Better Work for More People: Meaningful Jobs and the Renewal of Virtue

Better Work for More People Meaningful Jobs and the Renewal of Virtue

John J. Sarno

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"Share your knowledge. It's a way to achieve immortality."

Dalai Lama

Dedication

for Elizabeth and Carolyn Long may you run

John J Sarno 2021

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Introduction 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

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Making a Living The Origins of Work Work and Its Discontents Work and Belonging The Meaning of Work Trust and Engagement 7. Work and Health 8. The Future of Work Author Profile

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26 40 68 186 220 265 277 293

Introduction Work is how humans build their culture and take their place in the current of human history. For most people, it fulfills a powerful biological need and critical social function. For many, work is a form of expression and a core component of identity. For some, work gives meaning and shape to life and, for a few, it is a continuous an act of creativity and selffulfillment. For others, work is degrading and demeaning. In either circumstance, work is inextricably linked to our wider culture and it’s civic and political institutions. In a market economy, work is the primary way to make a living; and how we make a living impacts our physical and emotional health, our family relationships, our social relations, and how we govern ourselves.

As work goes, so does America. At least since the end of the Cold War, bi-partisan legislation and public policy has degraded work and the worker.

Globalization and automation are viewed as immutable forces of nature and the elimination of millions of jobs as a rational economic response. Americans are told to be more flexible and to learn new skills to adapt to the changing nature of work and the economy. As a palliative, government spends millions of dollars on workforce development, the results of which have been uneven. Concurrently, federal policies actually encourage job elimination and subsidize the social costs associated with demoralized workers, broken families and hollowed out communities. 1 1

For a dramatic rendition of a working person’s resiliency, the reader is encouraged to listen to “Jack of All Trades” which appears on the 2012 album Wreaking Ball by Bruce Springsteen. Throughout, the protagonist remains hopeful, maintains his pride and uses what he

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At the same time, well into the twenty first century, workers in America are divided by class, gender and race. In 2020, in America, displaced manufacturing workers travel the country as itinerant workers, looking for jobs to support their families, much like the displaced industrial workers did in the 1870s and 1930s. 2 Workers essential for the national security during a public health crisis are underpaid, overworked and face constant risks to their health and safety.

Even before the crisis, the World Health Organization had documented dangerous levels of stress in the workplace, more pronounced among working women. The majority of workers report being disengaged and disconnected from their work, many of whom work in de-skilled, routinized jobs ripe for automation. People without work suffer from chronic physical and health problems and many have turned to extremism and conspiracy cults to fill an existential void.

Many of the chronically unemployed languish in prisons or die deaths of despair. In a country that professes political democracy and business innovation, most workers are treated as human scrap. Bi-partisan legislation and public policy have facilitated the concentration of income for a few and a race to the bottom for the many. In short, for millions of Americans, work, a human activity that fulfills enormously important biological, psychological social and civic functions, is de-humanized. This degradation of work correlates precisely with a decline in informed participation in the democratic process, thus concentrating political power, like income. To paraphrase Jefferson, it is the disconnection from work and from other social institutions,

has and learns to make do. But in frustration and anger he says, “if I had me a gun, I’d find the bastards and shoot ‘em on sight.”

2

WSJ Nov. 29, 2020 https://www.wsj.com/articles/gms-closedlordstown-factory-spawns-a-wave-of-industrial-migrants11606674412?mod=hp_lead_pos7

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that can breed a depravity and corruption of morals, making Americans fit objects for despots.

In America, no one is owed a living, although to pursue a living is a fundamental right. “The right to work . . . [is] the most precious liberty that man possesses. Man has indeed as much right to work as he has to live, to be free, to own property .... It does many men little good to stay alive and free and propertied if they cannot work. To work means to eat. It also means to live . . . “ 3 In fact, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights declares work is a human right. 4 Most people in the United States will work, or have worked, forty or more years. 5 Throughout most of American history, wages, hours of work, and working conditions have received most of the legislative, academic and public policy attention. Strikes and lockouts has marked labor relations for over a century. Violence on the picket line and the 3

Barsky v. Bd. of Regents of the State of New York, U.S, Supreme Court (1954). Quoting Justice William O. Douglas in dissent.

4 Article 23 provides: (1) Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.

(2) Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.

(3) Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.

(4) Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.

5

At the time of this writing, the author estimates that he is nearing 90,000 hours of work for pay since graduating undergraduate school.

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seizure of industrial facilities by workers were not uncommon. Politics has always played a role as labor activism and has been snarled up in anti-communism Red scares. Labor rights and civil rights converged. However, at least since the United States became the dominant world economic power after the Second World War, the quality of work-life has been the major focus of the millions of Americans who work for a living. This privileged position, of course, is due to relative mass affluence.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, most wage workers worried about whether he or she had enough money for food or about missing a paycheck due to illness or being destitute after their prime working years were at an end.

While millions of working men and women continue to experience food insecurity and often work dangerous jobs as essential workers without sick pay, the majority of working adults in the first decades of the twenty first century feel a different kind of insecurity and dread. For many, there is psychic malaise, even crisis, in the satisfaction and meaning of their work and many wonder whether working for a paycheck is worth the mental and physical toll. Having no real choice, with options diminished or closed, their work-life actually poses substantial health risks, as well as carrying enormous social costs.

Economists and industry leaders contend that a qualified workforce is the single most critical component to economic growth and the nation’s political leaders - Democrats and Republicans alike – have long believed that education and training are the route back to middle class wages for those who have fallen out. Yet, deliberate tax and spend policies perversely subsidize employers for de-skilling jobs, laying 6|Page

workers off and offshoring jobs. The social costs incurred by these corporate workforce practices – such as rising healthcare costs and increases in public speeding and debt, are externalized and hidden from public view. By and large, it is the worker that is blamed for their failure, as she stands alone, without union protection, without bargaining power, to take a job or leave it. Promoters of robots and leaning machines predict the same fate for many educated professionals in the not too distant future.

The constant through the centuries has been the enormous and relentless pace of technological change, displacing human beings with machines, all along the way creating wrenching economic dislocation, social havoc and personal abandonment. From craftsmen and artisans, to farm and factory workers, to Organization Men in bureaucratic corporations, to white collar administrators and retail workers, to highly educated professionals, to designers and artists, insecurity has been a hallmark of wage work in a market economy that seeks efficiencies and profit from automation.6 Why do we work? Naturally to sustain physical life – to provide food, clothing, shelter and other necessities. But work is also essential to human development. To Locke and Jefferson, work was a natural right and a duty owed to the commonwealth. To Marx, the function of work was primarily economic and materialistic. For Lincoln, free labor was one of America’s most cherished values. Walt 6

The mid-twentieth century period may be the only exception to this rule due to America’s once-in-a-lifetime economic hegemony over most of the world.

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Whitman found eternal meanings and the spirit of democracy in work. For Freud, work provided a sense of reality, a vital connection to society. Weber described work as a calling, a duty to serve the spiritual nature of man.

Veblen postulated a biological work instinct. For Reverend King, work was a human right, a prerequire for human dignity. As work is both an act or individual will and a social institution, an answer to the question necessarily requires a social and political critique.

Uptonian thinkers have speculated about a world of work in which the burden of labor could be reduced by limiting human wants and sharing the work out to everyone but they could never satisfactorily solve the perennial problem of the free-rider. Communists have sought to dignify labor and attempted to devise a social framework in which work is fulfilling because the worker owns the means of production.

But the outcome of such a program meant ownership by the state and the degradation of the worker. In the United Sates and other industrialized countries, the approach by most social reformers has been to reduce the length of the working week, to increase the number of paid days off and to improve pay and working conditions. Unions have had the same basic agenda but have also tried to build labor solidarity among workers. The pushback of the ownership class and the state have been virulent and violent. With working conditions vastly improved for most Americans, the focus of reform has shifted to making work more meaningful and gratifying.

Promoters of technology look to robots and learning machines to eliminate work altogether. These schemes, however, if fully realized, will create a permanent servant class and the end of democratic society. 7 7

The Oxford Book of Work ed. Thomas, K. (1999) xviii-xix.

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Work is a biological need inextricably linked to survival. It is also a social institution and therefore influenced greatly by family, school and other social dynamics, including the distribution of wealth and political power, racial and gender attitudes and national identity, to name but a few. Many work and wish they did not have to, while others are not working but wish they could. Throughout our history, some work has killed the workers performing it and others have died for the right to work those very same jobs. While many millions of Americans work for living, millions are marginalized and subjugated because of socially construed barriers based on race, ethnicity, gender and disability.

Millions more are socially adrift, disconnected and maladjusted to social and cultural norms. Many are caught in a vicious cycle of violence and self-destruction. Others experience deaths of despair. Because work plays such a pervasive and powerful role in human development and fulfills such an essential role in people’s lives, many of the psychological and social maladies in our time can be traced to the absence of work.

From the beginnings of colonial America, and well before, work has been persistently glorified as something good in itself. Although the American work ethic has changed over time, it is still extraordinarily strong. The idler, whether rich or poor, tends to be depicted as slovenly and undesirable. In Work and Human Behavior, Walter Neff attempted to formulate a psychological theory of why people work. 8 Although work can be compelled by force, in the end, Neff concludes, “work is neither a blessing nor a curse, but simply one of the major conditions of man’s 8

Neff, W. The Psychology of Work (1974) republished as Work and Human Behavior (1985).

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existence . . . Work is still a major life-sphere and will remain so indefinitely.” 9 America has long been a nation of employees. In early 2020, just at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic the U. S. labor force reached a high of 164.6 million persons, an eight percent increase from 2010. Of those millions people who work in the United States, over 126 million hold full-time jobs. More than 44 million people work part-time, another 7 million work on a contingent or temporary basis. Over 12 million Americans are self-employed. Almost 10 million people work as independent contractors or gig workers. 10 Since March 2020, in response to the coronavirus pandemic, millions of Americans have lost their jobs as tens of thousands of businesses were closed. But millions of Americans stayed on the job as essential workers employed by essential businesses. The pandemic has revealed much about the nature of work in the U.S. as state executive orders have defined the “essential services” necessary for the public health, safety and welfare. In normal times, men are a majority of the overall work force. But this crisis has flipped that. In March, the Department of Homeland Security released a memo identifying “Essential Critical Infrastructure Workers,” an advisory guide for state and federal officials. It listed scores of jobs, suggesting they were too vital to be halted even as cities and whole states were on lockdown. A majority of those jobs are held by women, an undeniable fact. And yet many of the workers on the front lines doing this essential work, many have experienced a lack of adequate safety measures, supplies and risk compensation. In the beginning, health-care workers 9

Id. 28 All told, the average American worker spent 225 hours, or well over nine full calendar days, commuting to and from work in 2018.

10

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didn’t have enough face masks, and poultry packing plants were crowding workers too close together. Thousands in each sector contracted COVID-19 - disproportionately people from already disadvantaged groups like Black and Latinx Americans and immigrants. At the time of this writing, no one can predict exactly how the pandemic will impact the workplace, how we will work, who will work and where; but it’s undeniable that exiting inequalities have been turbocharged by the pandemic.

Although pay discrimination is unlawful in the United States women working full time in the are paid 82 cents to every dollar earned by men. Further, Nationwide, essential employees earn an average of 18.2 percent less than employees in other industries. 11 Black women, and Latinas earn 62 cents and 54 cents, respectively, for every dollar earned by white male. More than one in three Black women are in front line jobs, including roles as personal care aides, nursing assistants, cashiers and retail salespeople. 12 Black women doctors, nurses, teachers, child-care workers, waitresses and cashiers are, on average, paid 11- 27 percent less than white men who are working the same job. 13 Latina doctors are paid 68 percent of the average hourly wage of 11

Business.org May, 2020 https://www.business.org/finance/accounting/average-salary-ofessential-workers/ 12

National Women’s Center July 2020 https://nwlcciw49tixgw5lbab.stackpathdns.com/wpcontent/uploads/2020/07/Black-Womens-Equal-Pay-Day-Factsheet7.27.20-v3.pdf 13

Economic Policy Institute April 2020 https://www.epi.org/blog/black-women-workers-are-essential-duringthe-crisis-and-for-the-recovery-but-still-are-greatly-underpaid/

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non-Hispanic white male doctors, a difference of $20.46 per hour. 14 Latina teachers and child care workers are paid 84 percent of what non-Hispanic white men are paid in their respective occupations.

The persistence of the gap in the earnings of women and men is not entirely understood by researchers. Some of the factors that determine the earnings of workers are quantifiable, such as job skills, education level, work experience, union membership, hours worked, industry and occupation. But information on other factors, such as occupation-specific skills or the work environment, is incomplete. In addition, some factors that may result in a wage gap between women and men are difficult to measure. These include the responsibilities of child rearing and caring for ill or elderly family members. At least one survey shows that woman take the majority of leaves from work to care for children or 15 family members.

Gender serotyping and pay discrimination may also play a part in the pay gap.

For many professionals and office workers, technology has been a lifeline during the pandemic, enabling them to be productive at home. Many have been miserable and burned out for a long time. Nevertheless, working from home has been a privilege for those higher paid employees who can perform work remotely while essential workers who make less money bear the costs of commuting. People who work 14

Economic Policy Institute Oct. 2020 https://www.epi.org/blog/latina-equal-pay-day-essential-latinaworkers-face-substantial-pay-gap-during-covid-19-pandemic/ 15

Employers Association of New Jersey Family Leave Survey (2019) https://www.eanj.org/blog/family-leave-insurance-survey-workeruptake-and-employer-burden

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from home are more likely to be white and have high incomes. 16 Workers not on the coronavirus front lines haven’t faced the same health risks as those working essential jobs. But many white collar workers are confronting existential questions about the meaning of their work amidst alienation and anomie. What difference does their work really make without the social connections on the job? A survey during the pandemic found that 26.7 percent of nearly 2,000 respondents agreed with the statement, “I’m not considered essential or don’t think I am, but I’m still working. My work doesn’t feel particularly important or meaningful.” 17 The tension between human health and economic health crystallized from debates and protests about reopening the 16

At the height of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, The New Yorker published photographs by Karen Cunningham of New York City nurses on the frontline which are a blur of sickness, urgency, risk, and loss within 12-hour shifts. “This is what we trained to do,” says Caty Chapman, a nurse at Lenox Hill hospital. Retrieved at https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/04/a-city-nurse.

Fast-food workers were designated essential workers. The work is stressful, chronic understaffing, time clocks monitoring breaks and rude customers. During the second surge of the COVID-19 pandemic in late 2020, the magazine published photos by Richard Renaldi of fastfood workers that show the dignity of the human beings in the uniform. Retrieved at https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/11/30/faces-of-a-fastfood-nation

17

Wall Street Journal https://www.wsj.com/articles/as-pandemicslows-business-workers-fret-is-my-job-relevant11592737200?redirect=amp

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economy and more in-person businesses. As Luke Fogelson has pointed out while examining the anti-lockdown protests in Michigan, the argument has been framed, in part, as a right to work. “Today, for many Americans, working is an expression of liberty” he says. 18 And for some Americans, working has near religious meaning. Human work proceeds directly from persons created in the image of God and called to continue the work of creation. Work honors the Creator’s gifts and the talents received by humankind and fulfills, in part, the potential inscribed in human nature.

Work has also been a foundation of democracy, of equality and liberty. In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville noted that "[e]very honest profession is honorable . . .

Among democratic people’s where there is no hereditary wealth, every man works for his living, or has worked, or comes from parents who have worked. Everything therefore prompts the assumption that to work is the necessary, natural, and honest condition of all men.... In the United States professions are more or less unpleasant, more or less lucrative, but they are never high or low . . . ” 19 In 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. during the Poor People’s Campaign, spoke at Bishop Charles Mason Temple of the Church of God in Christ in Memphis, Tennessee. The church was overflowing with sanitation workers on strike and their supporters. In his speech, Dr. King connected their strike to the plight of all workers, especially those in the service economy. The Memphis sanitation strike would become a 18

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/08/24/the-militiasagainst-masks 19

Tocqueville, A. Democracy in America (1837)

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major part of the campaign. Articulating a universal truths about work and equality, he said “So often we overlook the work and the significance of those who are not in professional jobs, of those who are not in the so-called big jobs. But let me say to you tonight, that whenever you are engaged in work that serves humanity and is for the building of humanity, it has dignity, and it has worth. One day our society must come to see this. One day our society will come to respect the sanitation worker if it is to survive, for the person who picks up our garbage, in the final analysis, is as significant as the physician, for if he doesn’t do his job, diseases are rampant. All labor has dignity.” 20 The dignity of work lies at the heart of self-worth, self-esteem and selfgovernance.

All along the social and political spectrum, therefore, work is seen as an expression of equality, autonomy, dignity and purpose. Work’s meaning in our lives is a constant source of stability in an unpredictable world. We need work like we need oxygen. We may not live to work, but like breathing, it is essential to our well-being and to our society as a whole.

However, meaningless work, on the other hand, crushes the spirit, undermines self-governance and facilitates unethical acts, even crime, within organizations.

A skilled and engaged workforce able to drive business success, together with an informed, engaged citizenry able to support democratic institutions are indispensable to national survival.

Surveys of working Americans offer a mixed-bag of views and attitudes. Most Americans say that they are satisfied with their work but most are not engaged in the work itself.

About half of workers say that they get a sense of identity 20

All Work Has Dignity, Collected Speeches

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from work but trust in management to make work a better place is low. Most Americans report that they are happy but their behavior belies that view.

Our history has been one long struggle to secure productive work at a living wage. During the early industrial period, factories de-skilled and displaced independent artisans and craftsman. Many viewed slavery and wage work as equivalent, as industrial workers were exploited to their death. Men, women and children worked brutal hours at starvation wages in inhuman conditions. Labor strikes and civil unrest lead to violence and oppressive policing.

Clinging to free market economic orthodoxy, courts stripped both state and federal governments of their authority from enacting basic labor protections. Applying pseudo-science, white and Black workers were classified as sub-human and beyond the underserving of even Christian charity. After the Civil War, as veterans and displaced workers. For most of the twentieth century, unemployment was viewed as an individual’s own moral failing.

After the Civil War when veterans and displaced persons travelled the countryside in search of work, unemployment was criminalized by many states and localities. Convict labor, the cheapest of all labor, built thousands of miles of roads. Likewise, immigrant labor built railroads and other critical infrastructure.

Emancipated slaves became sharecroppers, barely making ends meet. Jobs remain segregated and ages unequal based on race, sex and ethnicity to this day.

Unions flourished for a time, raising living standards, but by the end of the Cold War, most workers were treated as scrap.

Management fads proliferated to obscure the fact that the objective of many corporations was to eliminate as many 16 | P a g e

jobs as possible. Whole communities, many in the urban core of the country, withered and died, leaving shuttered manufacturing facilities and social pathology in its wake And to the enduring shame of the nation, almost an entire generation of Black men in their prime working years were incarcerated. Simultaneously, enterprise software de-skilled and modularized jobs making white collar workers easy prey.

At the same time as corporations stepped up their affirmative action initiatives predominantly white, long tenured employees were being let go in droves, federal agencies were completing a decade of investigations into structurally job discrimination. In 1995, after a generation of investigation and litigation, the President's Glass Ceiling Commission examined the impediments to greater equality in the workplace and concluded that many white males perceived that they are losing -"losing the corporate game, losing control and losing opportunity. Many white male middle managers view inclusion of minorities and women in management as a direct threat to their own chances of advancement." Evidence of this conclusion could have been seen at Texaco Corporation, the petrochemical giant. Two years after the Glass Ceiling Report was issued, the company paid $176.1 million to settle a race discrimination lawsuit, at the time the biggest such settlement in history. While the media portrayed the company's culture as poisoned by bias, prejudice and stereotyping, a more careful examination reveals a company in crisis, where anger, fear and resentment pervaded the organization.

As a big corporation, Texaco's culture was fairly typical. A command-and-control organizational structure required conformity throughout the corporate hierarchy. Individual autonomy was suppressed in favor of a safe place in the 17 | P a g e

bureaucracy and as was typical of the post-war deal between employer and employee, job security was exchanged for loyalty and discipline. Also typical of this culture, was the absence of objective criteria for promotion and widespread subjective decision making when it came to personnel. Many managers, mostly middle-aged white men, had spent their entire careers playing by the rules of “the club.�

As with most corporations, Texaco was not immune from global competition and deregulation of its industry and its eventual restructuring called for major consolidation and layoffs. The layoffs in particular were viewed as an act of betrayal by the men who had devoted the better part of their working lives to the corporation. At the same time, the company was under an obligation to fulfill an affirmative action goal of increasing the percentage of minorities in management jobs. Anger and resentment spilled into meetings and corporate functions, including a holiday party.

Well-meaning but poorly executed "diversity training" backfired and left the rank-and-file deeply divided along racial lines. The division and conflict were secretly captured on an audio tape, a transcript of which was widely published.

The result was a disaster for the company, its employees and shareholders. In the same year as Texaco's settlement, a survey asked whether Black Americans were subject to "flagrant or obviously discriminatory practices." Fifty-five percent of Blacks agreed with the statement, only four percent of whites agreed. This wide gap in perception can only be bridged by outcomes. Accordingly, Texaco increased its efforts to promote African Americans in management jobs through mentoring and training programs.

As a matter of policy, higher education was made more available minorities but jobs requiring a college education are diminishing.

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In 2012, the Economic Policy Institute issued a report that found that the average inflation-adjusted hourly wage for male college graduates aged 23 to 29 dropped 11% over the past decade to $21.68 in 2011. For female college graduates of the same age, the average wage dropped to 7.6% to $18.80. By 2020, 35 percent of the workforce held a bachelor’s degree but fewer than twenty percent of the jobs required that level of education. About 25 percent of college graduates earned no more than the average high school graduate. Part of the reason, of course, is oversupply of college graduates for an economy that has not made the transition to information-intensive jobs. While technology increased the demand for educated workers, the demand has been consistently outpaced by the number of new college graduates entering the job market. In fact, the Bureau of Labor Statistics forecasts that by 2026, at least 64 percent of jobs will require no education beyond high school. Only one in four jobs will require a bachelor’s degree. Of the ten occupations projected for job growth in the next decade, only one – registered nurses – requires a college degree and six do not technically require a high school diploma.

In 2019, prior to the pandemic-induced recession, most states were experiencing robust job growth. But even as the jobs were being filled, in nearly every metropolitan area in the country, wages declined from the prior year. Many of the service, production and health jobs that were in demand required an eighth grade education to perform. Still, employers said that they could not find and retain qualified workers to fill those jobs. While employers complain about a “skills gap” it’s more likely that America suffers from a wage gap. For the most part, the problem is not that workers lack the skills to perform these semi-skilled jobs. The problem is that employers can’t find enough workers with

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basic skills willing to take low wage jobs. 21 Regardless of the human resources propaganda, most employers do not compete for talent. Instead, they are businesses competing on price, looking to pay the lowest possible wages.

About seven million Americans work on a contingent or temporary basis, many project-to-project. As Daniel Pink points out in Free Agent Nation: In the end, security and loyalty have acquired new meanings.

Security, once achieved through attachment to larger institutions, is now achieved by hedging risk and diversifying across several clients, customers and projects. Loyalty, which once ran vertically, has been turned on its side. It now runs horizontally-to colleagues, teams, professions and families. The result: For good or ill, the loyalty for security bargain that defined the American workforce for several generations is gone.

However, these so-called “contingent” jobs earn on average eighty-two percent of what their “regular” counterparts earn.

The data suggests a similar picture for benefits. Those that are employed in contingent arrangements are less likely than other workers to have health insurance from any source.

While almost three-fifths of workers holding traditional jobs have group health care insurance - about 129 million employees and their dependents - only one in two contingent workers have such coverage.

In 2019, the U.S. Department of Labor issued an opinion letter that re-defined the distinction between an employee and an independent contractor. In the Department’s letter, the unidentified company - whose workers, it appears, clean 21

Ehrenreich, B. Nickel and Dimed (2001) 201-202.

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residences - will not have to offer the federal minimum wage or overtime, or pay a share of Social Security taxes because the company “does not impose requirements on how its service providers must perform their work, such as what transportation route to take, the order in which to clean an apartment” or the type of tools and materials they must use.

The description suggested that it was referring to a company, like GrubHub, Handy, Uber, Lyft, Postmates, Thumbtack, YourMechanic or TaskRabbit, whose platforms allow customers to hire workers through an online interface.

Decisions about employment status typically hinge on several factors, including the extent to which the employer controls how the worker does his or her job, and how central the job the worker performs is to the company’s business.

In explaining its conclusion about the company in question, the Department cited the fact that workers had the freedom to choose when, where and how long they worked; the fact that they provided their own equipment; and the fact that the company did not have a mandatory training program. In fact, the workers are managed by algorithms resulting in unpredictable schedules and volatile income.

A fifth of the U.S. workforce have on-call or rotating schedules. 22 Protecting these so-called “gig workers” has been hotly contested in the courts and within state legislatures. Many believe that these “app workers” are exploited, as they are without health, safety and wage protection. In 2020, Proposition 22 passed in California ensuring that app-based drivers for companies like Uber and Lyft will remain independent contractors. The passage of Prop 22 was a major win for so-called “gig companies” and 22

Hyman, L, Temp (2018) at p. 303

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cemented their influence over state policy. And it is a serious loss for gig workers who had advocated for stronger workplace protections as well as labor advocates in other states hoping California could become a model for gig economy reforms.

In this survival-of-the-fittest gig economy, the goal, of course, is to pit worker against worker as they bid down the price of their services. The overall goal is to make workers interchangeable and thus replaceable. In this regard, the contingent worker is not that better off than the industrial worker of the nineteen century. The technology that offers choice and cheaper prices to consumers degrades the worker that produces the product or service.

Nevertheless, working at a job is the normal, and therefore, expected thing to do in a market economy. Indeed, time spent working on the job, even in a technologically advanced society, amounts to about half of all waking hours. For the average working adult, two-thirds of his or her life is spent working. For many people, only the family is the more dominate social experience in our lives.

U.S. workers continue to be more likely to say that they get a sense of identity from their job - 55 percent - as opposed to having their job just be something they do for a living – 42 percent. These results have been consistent throughout multiple Gallup polls since 1989. 23 These findings are closely correlated to higher education, as seven in ten college graduates get a sense of identity from their job. Older working Americans, those aged 45 and older, are slightly more likely than younger workers to get a sense of identity 23

Gallup (2014) https://news.gallup.com/poll/175400/workers-senseidentity-job.aspx

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from their job. This difference may be generational, reflecting older workers coming of age during a time when occupation mattered more to employees than it does today.

Or it may be that older Americans have been in the workforce longer and may be more established in their careers, thus gaining more of their identity from their job.

Still, many believe that millions of employees, clerical workers, administrators, consultants, telemarketers, corporate lawyers, service personnel, and many others — who are toiling away in meaningless, unnecessary jobs, and they know it. The anthropologist David Graeber calls these “bullshit” jobs. These are jobs which even the employee performing the job can’t really justify but they have to pretend that there’s some reason for it to exist. 24 In the course of Graeber’s research, he identifies five categories of meaningless work. “Flunkies,” he says, are those paid to hang around and make their superiors feel important.

“Goons” are public relations staff whose task is to convince the public their employer should be seen in a positive light.

“Duct tapers” are hired to patch or bridge major flaws that their bosses are too lazy or inept to fix systemically. “Box tickers” go through various motions, often using paperwork or serious-looking reports, to suggest that things are happening when things aren’t. Last are “taskmasters,” divided into two subtypes: unnecessary superiors, who manage people who don’t need management, and generators of useless information, whose job is to create and assign more useless information for others.

Graeber points to a YouGov poll in 2015 where nearly 40 percent of surveyed workers said their jobs make no difference. If all lobbyists or corporate lawyers on the planet 24

Graeber, D. Bullshit Jobs (2018)

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disappeared en masse, not even their clients would miss them, he says. 25 “Most corporate lawyers secretly believe that if there were no longer any corporate lawyers, the world would probably be a better place.” 26 Yet, unnecessary employment, regardless of the pay grade, fulfills an enormous social function, structuring life, allowing workers to support their families, have leisure, pay medical bills and tuition, save for retirement, pay taxes and to free up time to invest in more socially constructive ways.

But whatever the job, is there a point to working beyond necessity? If we did not live in a capitalist, market economy would we still work? Another way of asking the question is, if I were financially well-off and did not have to worry about earning an income, would I choose to work? The answer more likely than not, would be “yes and no.”

Certainly, providing for one’s family is a powerful motivator to work. Spouses form partnerships to manage both financial matters and the affairs of child rearing. A division of labor is common among working couples. A sincere desire to provide a safe, healthy and happy environment for offspring no doubt drives many a man and woman, married or not, throughout a lifetime. Many people will attest that they work 25

Heller, N. The Bullshit Job Boom. The New Yorker June 7, 2018 https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/the-bullshit-jobboom

26

Illing, S. Bullshit jobs: why they exist and why you might have one Vox Nov. 9, 2019 https://www.vox.com/2018/5/8/17308744/bullshitjobs-book-david-graeber-occupy-wall-street-karl-marx

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hard to enable their children to have a better life, to have a step up in the game of life. Work, therefore, is often deeply connected to parenting. The work is performed as an obligation to loved ones, another type of trade off where the work becomes a means to the end. In this case, saving and thrift may take precedence over status consumption Similarly, working to save a nest egg for retirement – working so as to one day to cease working – is a means to an end. But in all these cases, the work in itself has little purpose other than getting to an end, not unlike a rat in a Skinner box.

Therefore, unless we are to be set adrift in a market of aimless consumption and meaningless activity, we must give praise to the end result of a life of work, even if its drudgery.

Parenting is noble. Retirement is honorable. A pile of cash and cash equivalents is held in high esteem. In the end, a lifetime on the job has been worth it.

Finally, there are those who have an obligation to serve a higher ideal, as in a religious, scientific, artistic or social calling – a devotion to a craft, something that is compelled from within, rather than imposed from without. But these called individuals who literally love their work are certainly not the norm and therefore we must honor and exalt them, for they would be considered deviants if not so recognized.

As long as society places value on science, philosophy, art and other intellectual endeavor, the called ones will be held up as ideals.

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1. Making a Living The world is full of willing people, some willing to work, the rest willing to let them. – Robert Frost Robert Frost, one of America’s great poets was known for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech. He frequently wrote about rural New England in the early twentieth century, using that setting to examine complex social and philosophical themes.

A deep knowledge of Greek and Roman classics influenced much of his work. The quote above can be found on several websites listing inspirational quotes. For example, a SparkPeople comment elaborates as follows: Regardless of the job, someone is going to be willing to do it. Be it running a company, taking out the garbage, driving a UPS truck, or writing for a newspaper, someone is going to try their hardest to get that job. So, if you want it, you’d better be willing to give it your best effort, because someone else is going after it just as hard. 27 But the quote certainly can be read ironically: Regardless of the job, somebody has to do it and it may as well be someone else. Whether it is checking a list, sending a memo, attending a meeting or proofreading a report, if someone wants to do it, I am willing to let them. I will give the effort that keeps me from getting fired but not more than that.

27

SparkPeople, Inc. https://www.sparkpeople.com/resource/quotes_translation.asp?id=1 74

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The double meaning of Frost’s quote crystalizes the dilemma of work. If given the choice between work and, say, a recreational activity, many people no doubt would choose the latter. Most of us who hold a job would prefer not to live to work. But the alternative, working to live, is not that more appealing. Perhaps choosing between work and recreation is a false choice in the modern market economy where working for a livelihood is both necessary and needed to conform to widely held social norms. In all too many cases, working is both a blessing and a curse; after all the French word for work is travail, which in English can mean agony or torment.

In his book Human Capital, Thomas Davenport expresses a common but shallow view about work when he writes: If it hadn’t been for Adam and Eve, we wouldn’t worry so much about work. Genesis tells us that God gave the first two humans a pretty cushy deal. By providing then access to “every tree that is pleasing to sight and good for food,” He fixed things so the first couple did not have to work at all.

28

Such is the common but supercilious view that work equals punishment as Adam is consigned to cultivate the ground from which he was taken and thus earn is bread by the sweat of his brow. However, even a casual reading of Genesis reveals that Adam from day one was required to till the Garden of Eden as the natural consequence of his existence.

Thus labor, human labor, in so far as Genesis is concerned, is the natural expression of personhood, more a gift than a curse. Given Karl Marx’s deep study of Adam Smith and industrial capitalism it should not be a surprise that he 28

Davenport, T, Human Capital (1999).

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succinctly articulated the centrality of work to human nature when he observed: “Milton produced Paradise Lost for the same reason that a silkworm produces silk. It was an activity of nature.”

In 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century's end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain and the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. 29 There's every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. Once a nation achieves mass affluence, work hours tend to drop but Americas work more hours per week than their European counterparts, about 1,792 per year. In comparison, South Koreans work 2,390 hours. “It has a lot to do with the culture” says Lawrence Johnson, chief of the employment trends team at the International Labour Organization. 30 From 1948 – 1969, hours worked per adult rose modestly. From 1,069 to 1,124 per year. 31 After 1969, working hours began to rise, especially for women. No doubt, this had something to do with the inflation that was caused government borrowing to pay for the Viet Nam war.

Heightened global competition required Americans to work longer hours.

Adjusted for inflation, compensation stagnated for almost three decades, actually declining for workers holding a high school degree or less. Many Americans have not fared particularly well in the global economy. Real hourly wages for most workers went up only one percent since 1979 to 2006, even as those workers’ productivity has increased 60 percent. According to the U.S. 29

Keynes on Possibilities http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf 30 31

A World-Weary World? National Geographic ( Dec 2004) Schor, J. The Overworked American (1991) p. 79.

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Census Bureau, the median American family made $58,407 in 2006. That’s $991 less, adjusted for inflation, than the median in 2000.

The nineteen eighties were a period of increased overtime and less paid time off. Unmarried men worked an additional 334 hours per year in 1991 from twenty years before. And by the early twenty first century, an average American had to work 245 more hours, or over six extra weeks per year, just to reach the standard of living of 1973. 32 By adding a second income or increasing a spouse’s hours, many families have averted a decline in the standard of living. Thus, two income families have become the norm. In 2006, the medium income of working-age husbands-wife couples ages 25-59 - was $73,765, two-thirds higher than medium family income. Eighty percent of these couples owned their own home. But increased family pressure, coupled with an increase in the number of hours worked during the workweek, is why one-third of workers report that they are burned out and stressed-out. Almost two-thirds of working Americans would like to work less. Forty percent sat their work loads are excessive and about the same percentage complain about excessive job stress. In 2001, a Cornell University report showed that the competing demands of work and family were creating extreme stress. Half of all women wished they could work part time, but only two in ten actually did. Twenty percent of the men wished they could work part time as well. Only, 14 percent of the couples reported that they wanted both spouses to work full time.

Americans also used their credit cards to make up for stagnating wages even as the economy expanded significantly. In 2012, Americans borrowed the equivalent 32

Id. p. 81.

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of 135 percent of their annual incomes. Conversely, from 1970 to 2005, the U.S. economy grew by nearly 400 percent, from a $3.5 trillion to a nearly a $14 trillion economy. Due to investments in labor saving technology, per capita GDP nearly doubled but incredibly per capita income stayed flat.

While medium income increased by 32 percent during this time, this was primarily because women entered the workforce to bring in extra income. At the same time, after tax income of top earners tripled. In other words, the massive wealth created by increased productivity over the last thirty years or so has gone in large measure to top income earners.

According to economists Thomas Piketty and Emanuel Saez, 75 percent of all income gains from 2002 to 2006 went to the top one percent of households making $382,600 per year or more. In short, it is the wealthiest tenth of wage earners that are reaping most of the benefits of globalization.

But many working Americans were becoming fed up with raising inequality, or at least the perception of inequality. A 2007 Gallup poll found that 66 percent of Americans believed upper-income people do not pay enough taxes. On the other hand, they fear paying too much themselves. A 2008 Kauffman Foundation survey asked respondents about what posed the greatest economic threat to their wellbeing. “Higher taxes� was the most frequently cited worry, with 50 percent saying it was their first or second concern. Only 20 percent believed that the federal budget deficit was their top worry. So, it appeared that raising taxes to pay down the national debt was not a priority. However, raising taxes on the wealthy seemed vaguely fair, when the average American has experienced stagnant wages.

Tax cuts during the George W. Bush administration required more borrowing from other countries, using U.S. assets – corporations, real estate, intellectual property and other 30 | P a g e

revenue producing assets - as collateral. This debt inevitably lowers the net wages for the average worker, which requires more cheap goods from abroad so that the average American can maintain his or her standard of living. So, at the same time that debt maintains consumption, it decreases wealth, as it becomes exported or collateralized. The worst-case scenario is a spiraling down of wages as more jobs get outsourced and increasing income for the elite cadre of knowledge workers with superior skills that are able to compete and thrive in the global economy. This, of course, is a prescription for social upheaval, but oddly is the program that both left and right wing academics have been advocating for generations – that is, transferring wealth to developing nations as a form of economic reparations, or as the natural result of free markets.

Tax cuts for the wealthy at the expense of paychecks reached a diminished return giving rise to Occupy Wall Street and the Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns. In response, the Trump administration cut taxes further and increased deficit spending to historic levels. Unfortunately, that profligacy will come out of American workers’ paychecks for decades to come. In 2019, The Federal Reserve Bank found that over the last three decades, the wealthiest one percent of Americans saw their net worth grow by $21 trillion, while the wealth of the bottom fifty percent fell by $900 billion. 33 In the first decade of the twenty first century, it appears that globalization has demanded more work from the average American to stay even, particularly given that hundreds of 33

NY Times June 24, 2019 https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/24/business/economy/wealthtax-letter.html

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millions of workers around the world are ready, willing and able to perform the same amount of labor for less pay. In a series published by the Wall Street Journal in 2005 a decade’s long wage and wealth gap was explored.

Technology, globalization and unfettered markets tend to erode wages at the bottom and lift wages at the top. The series concluded that social mobility in America was at risk, even as most Americans wanted to desperately believe that their children at least had an opportunity for a better life. But by 2006 it was clear that middle-income families had lost ground to the highest-income group over two decades, as their average inflation-adjusted income grew less than half as much, or 27.9 percent. During this period, wages eroded for most workers.

Americans engage in all manner of jobs and work is performed in every corner of the country. In addition to the work performed in factories, offices, farms, restaurants, hotels, shops or on the road and pre-COVID-19 pandemic, over eight million people worked from home. Even prison inmates are legally employed, 90 thousand of which hold jobs. At any given time – pre-COVID-19 - six million adult Americans are not working or looking for work. Most have gone back to school, many, mostly women, are attending to responsibilities at home. Others are too ill or disabled to work and while there are no statistics on people who simply prefer to remain idle, a Gallup poll in 2011 suggested that unemployed people were probably more emotionally better off, healthier and happier than employees who were actively disengaged in their work. 34 The Gross National Product is only one measurement of this enormous amount of work.

34

Perhaps Henry David Thoreau put it best when he wrote: �I sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous to attend to the 32 | P a g e

The U.S. Department of Labor’s most recent Longitudinal Survey on Job Satisfaction suggests that most working Americans are reasonably satisfied with their jobs. Among the factors that support high levels of job satisfaction are having responsibility for one’s own work - 52 percenthaving a sense of worth in a job -42 percent - being recognized for individual contributions -40 percent - and the opportunity to make good use of skills and learning new skills - 35 percent.

The satisfaction levels on Americans on the job have remained fairly constant over last couple of decades.

Allowing for dips during recessions when job insecurity is high, the majority of Americans are very or somewhat satisfied in their jobs. At the same time, the majority of workers report not being engaged at work. Every year, Gallup surveys a nationally representative sample of employed adults and consistently finds that less than one in three employees were actively engaged in their work. Most were not engaged, primarily putting in their time, maintaining just enough productivity to avoid negative consequences, and putting little energy or passion into their jobs. Only 15 percent of the respondent’s strongly agreed with the statement that their current job “brings out [their] most creative ideas.” The researchers also explored the role of that workplace friendships played in promoting engagement. It has long been thought that friendships at work increase an employee’s sense of job satisfaction and well-being. Walter Neff observed that the social context of gross form of servitude called slavery . . It is hard to have a Southern overseer; it is worse to have a Northern one; but worst of all when you are the slavedriver of yourself.” (Excerpt from Walden). Thoreau believed that the less labor a man did, the better for him and the community.

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work permitted friendships and a sense of belonging. 35 The Gallup researchers found that about three-fourths of engaged employees, or about 21 percent of the total sample, strongly agreed with the statement “I have a friend at work that I share ideas with.” The research strongly suggests that of the relatively few employees who generate ideas, group affiliation and friendship play important roles in staying engaged.

In fact, the average worker’s satisfaction has little to do with the job itself. The top three criteria are a good paycheck, friends and an easy commute. Two-thirds of employees report that they are disengaged at work, meaning that they are emotionally and cognitively disengaged. Therefore, we can reasonably assume that most Americans view their jobs as a means to an end. They are mostly satisfied with the pay and are reasonably friendly with their co-workers. But they are not overly fond of the work they are doing, as the majority of workers are basically sleep walking through their work. Stated another way, the research suggests less than two of every ten of workers are highly valued due not their extraordinary level of engagement, commitment and willingness to share what they know. They have their best ideas at work and in the knowledge-intensive environment must be considered part of the organization’s core. This, of course, is conjecture but experience and case studies lend more than an air of credence to this hypothesis. Research suggests that these core workers are motivated intrinsically, in various degrees, by autonomy, esteem and learning. The social science literature suggests that their work is a form of personal or creative expression, permitting them to “self-

35

Neff, W. The Psychology of Work 88

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actualize.” Everyone else is expendable and subject to elimination due to automation, outsourcing and downsizing.

According to the World Economic Forum, the United States is the most competitive country in the world primarily because its laws strongly protect intellectual property and it is relatively easy to terminate workers as redundant. Most people, at least theoretically, have a choice as to whether to work or not. It's this "choice" that forms the legal foundation of "at-will employment," which means that a person can quit a job at any time, for any reason or no reason, without penalty as the employer can terminate the employee at any time for any reason, or for no reason at all. Only in Hong Kong, Papua New Guinea, Singapore and Uruguay is it easier to terminate a worker. 36 In the United States, employees can be fired, terminated and discharged; let go, laid off and furloughed; downsized and rightsized: outsourced, reengineered and cashiered; individually, in groups or en masse.

“Reengineering eliminates not just waste, but non-value adding work as well,” observed Hammer and Champy in the best-selling Reengineering the Corporation. “Most of the checking, reconciling, waiting, tracking, monitoring-the unproductive work that exists because boundaries within an organization- is eliminated by reengineering, which means that people will spend more time doing real work.” (emphasis in the original). Presumably, the “real” work means work that adds value and “since workers in 36

At will employment would not pertain to the 20 million workers employed by state, local and federal governments and the 11 million workers in the private sector who belong to labor unions.

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reengineered processes spend more time on value-adding work and less time on work that adds no value,” educated white-collar workers should enjoy more job security.

However, the last three decades corporate restructuring, reorganizations, downsizing and outsourcing have driven tens of thousands of professionals and skilled technicians to seek opportunities as independent contractors, consultants and freelancers. Between 1979 and 1984, 10.8 million Americans were permanently laid off or dismissed. Most of these layoffs reflected permanent changes in the manufacturing sector. However, by the mid-1980’s, most firms had learned to use information technologies to reduce the number of white collar and middle management jobs.

“But the cost of shedding middle management would prove high, for middle managers had been the basis of the middle class itself. The promise of stability, clean work, and relatively high pay, all ties to company loyalty, had provided stability to American politics and work for two generations.”

37

Advancements in communication technology have made many management functions redundant. The traditional role of middle management in a corporate hierarchy had been to collect, verifies and assemble information from below, organize it, and push it up the chain of command. However, “groupware” and “office suites” that organize information and facilitate peer-to-peer interaction has, literally, cut out the need for the “middleman,” thus leaving managers of white collar production workers vulnerable to organizational consolidation and reengineering. According to Catalyst, a research and advocacy firm restructuring has reached even the executive sites of corporate America. From 2002 to 2007, the total number of corporate-officer positions 37

Saval, N. Cubed (2014) at p. 241

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declined twenty-one percent. At the end of the Twentieth Century, of America’s largest one hundred companies, seventy-seven percent of all layoffs involved white-collar workers, many of them older workers. As a result, nearly six million people over the age of fifty who remain working are self-employed. Many are transitioning to retirement and while some of those laid off have been able to go on to more satisfying, more meaningful work, many have experienced lower wages, either as contractors or consultants, or because the jobs that they have landed on the rebound pay less.

At present, so-called artificially intelligent agents can now replace some human work, such as computing and customer service. A two-year study by McKinsey Global suggests that by 2030, intelligent agents and robots could replace as much as thirty percent of the world’s current human labor.

McKinsey suggests that, in terms of scale, the automation revolution could rival the move away from agricultural labor to industrial labor in the United States and Europe. 38 The study suggests that in about sixty percent of occupations, at least one-third of the constituent activities could be automated, implying substantial workplace transformations and changes for all workers. More than 25 million Americans, almost one-third of all white collar workers and 19 percent of the total workforce, are professionals and highly skilled technicians. While these jobs may be augmented by Arterial Intelligence (AI), even these “knowledge workers” are likely to experience profound job insecurity. In the short term, the study forecasts that 400 million and 800 million office support jobs, customer service, food service, production and sales jobs will be 38

Job loss, job gains: what the future of work will mean for work, skills and wages (2017) (https://www.mckinsey.com/featuredinsights/future-of-work/jobs-lost-jobs-gained-what-the-future-ofwork-will-mean-for-jobs-skills-and-wages#

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automated. The study found similarities between the scope and effects of automation today compared with earlier waves of technology disruption, going back to the Industrial Revolution. However, automation going forward might prove to be more disruptive than in recent decades - and on par with the most rapid changes in the past - in two ways.

First, if technological advances continue apace and are adopted rapidly, the rate of worker displacement could be faster. Second, if many sectors adopt automation simultaneously, the percentage of the workforce affected by it could be higher. In short, work may become a scare resource for some time.

The World Economic Forum forecasts that long-term about 133 million new roles may emerge. In short, for the vast majority of Americans who are now about halfway through a profound economic and social transformation, the shortterm reward is survival. However, the long-term fate of working Americans is contingent upon the ability of the United States to remain powerful in education, technology, and innovation. More than that, it will require Americans to spend less time consuming and more time re-tooling and learning. Assuming that government policies that are politically possible and affordable to achieve, this will require a substantial psychological, social and economic transformation. Such will be the case because work has deep biological roots for humans and is a necessary psychological foundation for human development. Throughout history, the absence of work, at least in a market economy, has resulted in serious maladjustments and social pathology. It is doubtful that a democracy can even exist without meaningful and productive work for the vast majority of its citizens.

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2. The Origins of Work As intelligent beings, we prefer to see ourselves as rational persons. Whether we are deciding who to marry or what job offer to accept, the decision we say is a choice that we make, an act of free will. The presence of rational decision making is at the core of most of our economic model, as the term "economic man" - also referred to as "homo economicus" refers to an idealized person who acts rationally, with perfect knowledge and who seeks to maximize personal utility or satisfaction. But a strong counter view in Western thought is that men and women are not so hard wired for free will and that we are really not guided by the exercise of reason and thought; while consciousness exits, it is mostly chemical and physical processes, and the memories and reflexes that build up that determine our actions, which are essentially automatic, involuntary and instinctual. We sometimes say that we are creatures of habit. Life coaches tell us to do what is natural to be happy. If all of our material needs were met, either through the accident of birth or the luck of the lottery,

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would we choose to work in a job or would we pick up a hobby or two?

Human labor is a biological function and is a central feature in what we call human nature. Like water power, labor power exists in nature. The water running over a fall is a natural source of power – energy. When that power is harnessed and directed for a purpose, it is transformed into a means of survival. Thus, in nature, there is no distinction between labor and survival, it is one seamless biological impulse; and so it is with human labor, like the beaver that builds its lodge of sticks and mud, complete with ventilation and underground entrances.

For the beaver, the activity is instinctual, a result of evolution. Indeed, Darwin's finches of the Galåpagos Islands became renowned for their nest-building habits, collecting cotton seeds, sticks and grass to meticulously build their nests. 39 For the human, we call the activity – essentially the same activity as the beaver and finches - labor. In both cases, it is a natural activity but with humans the activity arises out of complex interactions between individuals, within the family unity and within the wider society. A job, has been the de facto cultural norm since the late- nineteen century when the majority of Americans were classified as employees, as opposed to independent craftsman, artisans, mechanics, small producers and farmers. As employment, most work has been socialized, it is performed in the public domain with others. It is a dominate social experience, perhaps second only to the institution of the family, relating to, influencing and affecting all, if not most, other aspects of human experience. Even in an advanced technological society, half of all waking hours are spent working; fully 39

Charles Darwin, Origin of Species.

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two-thirds of human life is spent working. In that regard, it is no small matter for a person to feel genuinely and authentically good about her individual work and accomplishments. Even if not the total expression of individual choice. Happily, human work is not always compulsory. Indeed, much of it is cooperative. And even the market transaction is subject to mutual obligations and ethical responsibilities beyond the work for hire contract. It is not uncommon for members of a work team to develop bonds of loyalty, even affection for one another.

One of the consequences of the publication of Darwin’s Origins of Species in 1859 was the application of biological evolution to social and cultural development. Both Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, among many other philosophers, were heavily influenced by Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, using it as an unscientific metaphor to interpret the economic development of human history and the psychic development of the human mind. Our psychoanalytic heritage, such as it is, insists that human behavior is determined by unconscious forces struggling and adapting to social constraints imposed by the culture.

Freud and his many followers and acolytes believed that all human behavior was driven by survival instincts, a principle owed to Darwin. But owing also to Hobbes, human behavior is understood to be essentially rivalrous with each person’s desires for pleasure competing with all others. Freud was convinced that he discovered the voracious human impulse to own and dominate the love object, which in bourgeoisie Victorian Vienna, was the mother. 40 Standing in the way of 40

Freud’s world view was entirely and exclusively patriarchal. Later, feminist theory found the roots of misogyny in the suppression and rejection of the male infant’s sexual impulse to devour, penetrate and

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the love object was the omnipotent power of the father.

Eventually an alliance of males vanquished the father causing the guilt that thereafter formed an internalized conscience. Freud thought he had discerned this innate process in primates and believed he had described universal truths of human and social evolution. All motivation was primarily the result of sexual drives and the group’s sublimation of those drives, through rejection, internalized guilt, punishment and internalized rules was the cause of all human behavior, which collectively created and maintained culture itself. When Freud was purportedly asked to specify the main requirements for human fulfillment, he answered, “to love and to work” and later wrote “that the life of human beings in common had a twofold foundation . . . the compulsion to work, created by external necessity, and the power to love . . .” 41 Psychoanalysis does not posit a work instinct as such, only an instinct for sexual desire, a life force and a counter, destructive force. 42 However, the sociologist Thorstein Veblen enunciated a human instinct to work. 43 “Early possess the love object-mother. The culture rewarded him with status and prestige. Girls that did not compete for the love object were rewarded with male approval. These roles codified into a type of master-slave relationship based on sex and gender.

41 Sigmund Freud. Civilization and its Discontents (1930), p.68.

42 Freud added this destructive force, Thanos, as a way of understanding and explaining the mass, mechanized slaughter of the First World War. He did not live to learn of the Holocaust, having left Vienna during the Nazi annexation of Austria but having died shortly before Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland.

43

The Instinct of Workmanship and the Irksomeness of Labor (1898) http://la.utexas.edu/users/hcleaver/368/368vebleninstinct.html

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humans were members of a group which depended for its survival on the industrial efficiency of its members and on their singleness of purpose in making use of the material means at hand,” he wrote. For Veblen, the instinct to work was a basic human drive and a staple of the human community but had been submerged as culture evolved into “predatory culture” of industrialism, deprecating craft and artisanal work and degrading the overall human condition.

Since work had become, more or less, exploitive, people were unhappy and avoided it whenever possible. Instead of engaging in satisfying, meaningful work connected to the community, industrial man “instinctively revolts at effort that goes to supply the means of life.” Thus, industrial man is in a constant state of conflict between the biological need for life-giving work and the alienated, degraded work of industrial society.

In any case, work is essential to being a fully functioning, healthy, reasonably happy, human being. While much satisfaction can be gained from work that fulfills the need for human affiliation, esteem and status, Freud observes that as a path to happiness, work is not valued highly by many people, “as the majority work only when forced by necessity, and his natural aversion to work gives rise to the most difficult of social problems.” 44 In the psychoanalytical framework, work is a sublimation of the sex drive and as a substitute for sex, it is a poor substitute unless you are a great artist. 45

44

Freud. p. 34, note 1.

In his speculative psycho-biography of Leonardo Da Vinci, Freud is explicit that Da Vinci’s creative drive was the result of sublimated 45

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The view that work and sex are derived from the same biological impulse has been propounded by Ives Hendrick, an American psychoanalyst. He has posited a “work principle” which is to say that pleasure can be derived from the nervous system and the ego acting to control or alter the environment. In other works, the act of shaping the environment through focused physical and mental energy is in and of itself, pleasurable. 46 Erik Erikson incorporates this view wholeheartedly and views the ability to work productively as a critical stage in human development, “a most decisive stage [for the children] , since it involves doing things beside and with others, a first sense of division of labor and differentiated opportunity, that is, a sense of the technological ethos of a culture . . . “ 47 In all likelihood, a work personality emerges in childhood at about age seven or eight, about the same time as the child begins to clearly define a sexual identity. Jean Piaget tells us that at or about this age, a child’s actions become less egocentric and that there is a clear effort to understand others.

The child begins to communicate objectively and factually and her actions become purposeful. 48 While collaboration in play appears form the age of four, “abstract collaboration” emerged at seven or eight, which can be seen in group drawings, coloring and, importantly, in helping younger children. There is an interaction of thought and the child begins to understand the motives of others. And while sexual instinct redirected to art and science. See Leonardo da Vinci and A Memory of His Childhood (1910).

46 Hendrick, I. Work and the Pleasure Principle. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly (1943).

47 Erikson E. Childhood and Society p 160.

48 Piaget, J. The Language and Thought of Children. New American Library (1974) pp. 138-39.

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dominance hierarchies can be observed in children as early as there years of age, at ages seven and eight complex decisions must be made to cooperate or compete. As in the early human work group, cheaters are subject to group pressure and a clear sense of right and wrong is apparent. It is uncertain whether play is an independent human drive but like work it is a major life activity and flows from the same desire to interact with others in purposeful activity. It appears that a child can be conditioned to work by the age of eight. 49 Cooperation in the general interest of the group is a basic building block of human culture and is the wellspring of human evolution, the genesis of language. Cooperation increased learning and ingenuity exponentially. Even now we have measured that breakthrough innovations and inventions occur within the group, not outside of it. Early humans that learned ever more cooperative behaviors for more efficient hunting and gathering and to build better shelters and stronger defenses created a more stable and prosperous tribe ultimately forming the basis of what can be called civilization. Since language and advanced cognitive ability are the prerequisites for social cooperation, it can be said that human history begins with cooperative work. Work performed by individuals for themselves, for each other and for the greater good of the group, is work performed at the highest level of humanness. In modern times, work that is 49

Estimates by the Association of Farmworker Opportunity programs, based on figures gathered by the Department of Labor, suggest that there are approximately 500,000 child farmworkers in the United States. Many of these children start working as young as age 8, and 72-hour work weeks (more than 10 hours per day) are not uncommon. https://www.aft.org/community/child-labor-united-states

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so deeply connected to human values, can be highly satisfactory and not irreconcilable with pleasure, even happiness. It is said that Homo faber – Man the Maker – is what separates humans from other working species. Only humans can influence the outcomes of existence and manage the environment with the use of tools. We can say confidently that toolmaking is a manifestation of humankind’s innate being in nature and is a natural function of our biology – upright posture, binocular vision, the prehensiled hand.

The earliest fabricated tools appear to be roughly chipped stones made by Homo habilis, an ancestor of Homo sapiens.

Dating as far back as 2.5 million years ago, these tools are a major milestone in human evolutionary history and were multi-purpose tools used for chopping, cutting, breaking, scraping and skinning. The stones fit firmly in the palm of the hand and had to have been gripped by figures and thumb.

It appears that flakes were removed from part of the surface, creating a sharpened edge which would have required a high level of perceptual and cognitive aptitude clearly separating this species from other animals that used implements at hand. The stone had multiple functions, grooved on one side, edged on another, pointed on one plane, blunt on another, smooth on one side, ragged on the other. All this in one tool!

A completely abstracted, three-dimensional design made concrete and material to fit a customized hand, to be gripped by customized fingers, to be felt in the nervous system, and made to coordinate with senses of perception and the movements muscle. The humanization of the tool, as an extension of the human body “has existed since the dawn of history, since one of our ancestors invented the flintstone and constructed it so that it fit the palm of his hand, so that the vibration (during use) would be felt through the nerves of the 46 | P a g e

hand and extend their sensibility, so as to eliminate all distinction between it and the hand that held it.� 50 Like a master sculptor with chisel and mallet, man and tool were one.

New technologies were invented. Hand-axe production, representing a veritable revolution in technology appeared one million years later than the multi-purpose tool, were the products Homo erectus ingenuity, this species being a closer ancestor to modern humans. This specialty toolmaking lasted about one million years basically throughout the Paleolithic Age, known commonly as the Stone Age. The hand-axe increased efficiency in butchering and skinning of game, digging in soil, and cutting wood or other plant materials. Most of the activity of the group, including children, would have been taken up with survival, hunting, gathering and toolmaking. In short, almost everything that early humans did would have been considered continuous labor.

More sophisticated tool making, cooperative behavior and a basic division of labor would have evolved together to hunt and preserve bigger game. The bigger kills would have led to a modest surplus for without a surplus of food, the group was required to constantly be on the move to be near a water supply, game and grassland for foraging berries and nuts.

Insects, birds and eggs were also a staple, implying a proximity to forests. The first division of labor would have been based on sex. Both sexes fabricated tools and implements to be used for their work. A more complex division of labor could not have appeared until group activities became sufficiently advanced to produce surplus food. In this regard, basket weaving was a great leap forward. With baskets to carry foodstuffs back to the shelter, 50

Umberto Eco. The Open Work.

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the group could take a respite from the constant travel. This would have led to more energy for mating, exploring and perhaps even to forms of creative expression leading to abstract reasoning and art. This would have occurred before the beginnings of agriculture and implies that tools, arts, crafts and other forms of creative effort would have appeared, more or less, together.

Competition between groups over habitat would have been fierce, leading to fight or flight. Better group cooperation and better weapons would have given an enormous advantage of one group over another. Close communication, planning and predicting would have been necessary. A rudimentary understanding of time would have been necessary. No doubt becoming an upright creature was the great evolutionary breakthrough for early humanoids. A sense of time would have occurred watching the sun traverse its course through the sky and a sense of space surely occurred gazing into the horizon, calculating opportunity and danger with binocular vision. An animal tethered to the ground could not have experienced these sensations, have formed these perceptions. Applying time and space would have begun the great advance to abstract reasoning and selfawareness, self-knowledge, mastery of more specialized tools and weapons, and ultimately to an existential question of the meaning of personal existence.

It is thought that Homo sapiens, at least in part, vanquished their Neanderthal brethren by developing, harnessing and deploying these advantages in the great contest over sustainable habitats. Evidence also suggests inter-species breeding occurred, estrus females being another resource to fight over. In any event, it would have been a surplus of food and mating partners which would have led these advantaged groups to the gate of humanness and the beginning of human history. That threshold would not have been crossed without 48 | P a g e

large scale cooperation and a sophisticated division of labor.

On the individual level, Neanderthals were in no way inferior to Sapiens. Neanderthal bodies were as fit, their hands were as dexterous and their brains were as big, if not bigger, than those of Sapiens. The Sapiens advantage probably lay in large-scale cooperation. Neanderthals lived in small bands that rarely if ever cooperated with one another. Sapiens too lived in small bands, but different Sapiens bands probably cooperated on a regular basis, including engaging in evidence for long-distance trade and communal burials. “While individual Neanderthals were perhaps as inquisitive, imaginative and creative as individual Sapiens, superior networking enabled Sapiens to swiftly outcompete Neanderthals.� 51 With or without tools, it is the division of labor that separates the work of humans from other species. 52 Presumably, early humans were more like generalists, a jack-of-all-trades, fabricating tools individually from start to finish. Work was not specialized and every adult would have done everything.

Thus, output would have been limited to the capacity of each separate member of the group. With a division of tasks, however, there is an assignment of different parts of a production process or task to different individuals in order to improve efficiency. A division of is essentially complex social behavior that requires advanced cognitive abilities.

The earliest evidence of cooperative group work can be traced to a cave in Jordon where thousands of stone tools 51

Sykes, R.W. Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art (2020).

52

The use of fire by humans is also considered as a defining property of intelligence, separating humans from other animals. The use of flints to start fire may have occurred as far back as 400,000 years ago, but concrete evidence only comes from as recently as 40,000 years ago

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were found dating back 45,000 years. It is unclear whether these toolmakers were anatomically modern humans but evidence of cooking nearby suggests that the work was a segregated activity that took place separated from living areas. Multi-purpose tools were used to create identical long, narrow blades, as if in mass production, for hunting, fishing and warfare. It appears that standardization of production minimized waste and increased production, similar to an assembly line. Trading may have occurred to bond allies and build relationships across tribes. These stronger social networks would have led to safer, better fed and more prosperous groups. Clearly this organized activity was a break from early forms of work and would have led to greater innovations and skill development. And this activity would have led to the specialization of other skilled labor, such as the fabrication textiles and the use of clay and metals to usher in the age of agriculture and the beginnings of modern human society. As work is the essence of culture, we may say that this is where culture begins at the point where labor becomes work. The primordial function and value of the labor engaged in by the sole generalist stemmed from existence itself. In full possession of self, labor is natural to the person with no need to compel by something outside the person as if it were a survival instinct. The division of labor is presumably imposed by superior, a group or both.

Organized work subsumes the individual labor into group work making work less the result of nature and more the result of culture. Group work certainly enhances the chances of survival but its function is also social, establishing social cohesion and stability, which in turn, facilitates greater cognitive ability and the development of social skills. We can now confidently say that humans are made to labor, it is in our very nature to do so. Work, however, is a product of 50 | P a g e

culture, a complex function of biology and society, governed by group norms and influenced by upbringing and role models. In short, it is through work that humans create and build their culture.

We may quickly trace this trajectory, as many have done, through the Genesis allegory in the Old Testament. Contrary to popular belief, the Garden of Eden was not a place where all needs are met without work. Adam is created and placed in the garden to cultivate and care for it as a natural consequence of his nature. Even in paradise itself Adam had to labor. Thus, in the beginning, in his original condition free from sin, Adam was intended to work. It was only later when Adam and Eve were punished did labor become work. With their banishment, the ground was forever cursed and in toil would humans eat of it all the days of our life.

With Adam’s “fall,� human history begins. The original harmony between man and nature is replaced by toil and suffering; humankind is alone and separated from nature.

His sin, his act of disobedience, eating from the tree of knowledge, is knowing between good and evil. He is now self-aware and from that awareness he builds his culture through work.

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In Erich Fromm’s interesting interpretation of the Genesis story, eating from the tree of knowledge is an act of independence and freedom. 53 But when Adam and Eve are expelled from the Garden, their labor which was of nature, becomes work that they will suffer against nature. In fact, humankind and nature become enemies but, observed Fromm, only then can humankind build its culture independent of the tyranny of nature. “The goal of man’s development is that of freedom and independence . . .

Independence is possible only if, and according to the degree to which, man actively grasps the world, is related to it, and thus becomes one with it. There is no independence and no freedom unless man arrives at the stage of complete inner activity and productivity.” 54 Certainly, competition over resources was a fact of life and competition within groups for food, mates, shelters and other limited resources would have led to hierarchical group formations as a way of allocating these limited resources.

53 54

Erich Fromm, You Shall Be As Gods (1966), Id at p. 126.

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Constant intergroup rivalry and violence would have resulted in weak and depleted groups with the eventual acquiescence to some form of leadership out of self-interest.

Thus, we see the insight of Thomas Hobbes as members in a constant condition of rivalry against each other form a selfperpetuating community for mutual aid and protection. 55 As for living in the state of nature, Hobbes said that man was free – free to slaughter each other, one against one, all against all. To avoid the primal fear of a violent death, individuals willingly gave up their freedom to a chief or alliance of chiefs that protected them. Hobbes’ humans in a state of society have no free will and their ruler is the ultimate sovereign. Individuals in society would accept any hardship, pay any tribune, engage in any act of subservience, commit any vile deed against others or loved ones, submit to any draconian service or labor demanded of them to avoid a violent death. Thus, the ruler threatened his subjects with violent death, tortured and impaled to impress the point, only to withdraw it as the price of continued subservience. The tyrant would also be able to safely rely on the nature of his subjects, who would be motivated by fear, greed and envy at every turn. Thus, we say, followers almost always deserve their leaders.

Given the dangers of a predatory environment, it was far better to be part of a community with lower status than no community at all. That leader or group of leaders would by necessity need superior communication and inter-personal skills to instill cooperation and surely because of that, superior language and cognitive abilities. The classic social critique of work is that when it is performed as an expression of free choice, where it is self-directed, it can be pleasurable.

55

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

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In contrast, work that is compulsory, directed by others, is miserable. But it is highly unlikely that solely self-directed work could result from the unparalleled productivity rendered by the division of labor. The work group of 45,000 years ago probably comprised a hierarchy of roles, perhaps the first evidence of a master-servant relationship. Members would have learned their trade from elders, like a Sone Age apprentice, but would have had to be directed by a master to organize and divide the activity.

The dominance-submissive behavior of leader-follower within the work group would have been learned from the type of group hunting necessary for stalking and killing bigger prey. Presumably, hunters would be rewarded with a share of the kill. One is reminded of the admonition of Paul the Apostle who said “he who does not work, neither shall he eat, later cited by John Smith in the early 1600s colony of Jamestown. Leadership would have evolved in these small groups with more sophisticated social behavior commensurate with brain development. In primates, it has been speculated that conformance is linked to anatomical features in the brain, specifically the lateral orbitofrontal cortex. Followers look to leaders for cues as to what to do, particularly when threatened from the outside.

Leaders must be noticed by group members and would have engaged in attention seeking behavior. While size and strength could have been factors for early humans, these factors would not have been determinative. Rather, social dominance would have been based on the ability to manage relationships and to solve problems as research from ethology and evolutionary biology strongly suggests that problem solving is correlated with cooperative behaviors.

Some form of punishment would have to have been meted 54 | P a g e

out for non-conformity as what is permitted and what is prohibited would be imposed on group members.

While dominance hierarchies are not static and lower ranking members of the group may attempt to engage in disruptive activity, group members tend to “know their place.” Dominate members of the group are prone to create and sustain a ranking system as subordinate followers not only take their cues from the leaders but from each other.

Thus, group or cultural learning takes place as group norms are developed and enforced.

The detection of violations of group norms emerges very early in children as they can recognize cheating at age of two or three. Within the early human groups, cheaters would have been “called out” and free-riders and shirkers would not only have been punished with the withdrawal of a food ration, they would also have been subject to ridicule, shunning and ostracism by the other group members. In extreme cases, the recalcitrant member would been exiled, beaten or even killed. Thus, the leader would govern the group but the group members would also govern themselves to preserve a fair allocation of resources.

In primates, subservient members often foment rebellion to improve their access to resources. Egalitarian behaviors could have emerged spontaneously as the optimal power sharing arrangement but hierarchal conditions most likely prevailed. Thus, leaders would have needed to be adept at forming alliances to stay in power and by forming reciprocal obligations with group members. Clearly, cooperative and reciprocal behaviors formed the basis of a stable community, not necessarily brute force. Consensus decision-making was quite possible, even probable within small groups and would have been a great advance in keeping the group engaged in 55 | P a g e

the task at hand. All of this would have been required for the stratification and division of labor that was necessary for early humans to carry out the complex tasks required by the survival of community interests, the allocation of manpower and the efficient use of limited resources.

Being a follower was also a complex undertaking.

Subservient males resented the leader and had to formulate their own sophisticated survival strategies. Primarily they need to decide if, when and how to compete with the leader either directly or through an alliance of other followers.

Losing members of the struggle for power and dominance would be shunned by the group or banished from the group entirely. This rejection by the peer group would have caused even greater resentment often motivating the banished to form their own groups. Surely, to this day, we can see how resentment or rejection motivates great effort. Having been rejected by peers individuals may spend an entire work-life on “showing them.” We have also observed pathologies among adolescents and young adults, scarred by rejection, who later engage in self-defeating or self-destructive behaviors to “get back at” the peer group. All of these dynamics and motivations contribute to how a group functions and how individuals function within the group.

How then did the division of labor function 45,000 years ago when the first recorded instance of it appeared? The first boss would have emerged from the hunting group, He would have been a great communicator and had superior social skills. He would have been bonded to the members of the group through mutual and reciprocal obligations. He would have had the authority most likely through an alliance with other dominate members to mete out rewards and punishments. Moreover, periodic competition between 56 | P a g e

subservient members of the group would have led to instability, thus enhancing the leader’s authority as a mediator between rival members. A ceremonial function to resolve disputes between rivals and to promote cooperative working would have led to the early tribunal, the foundations of government.

Additionally, based on the evidence, tool use is closely associated with religious belief. The earliest evidence of religious thought is based on the ritual treatment of the dead.

Lewis Wolper has argued that causal beliefs that emerged from tool use played a major role in the evolution of belief.

56 The manufacture of complex tools requires creating a mental image of an object which does not exist naturally before actually making the artifact. Furthermore, one must understand how the tool would be used, which requires an understanding of causality. Accordingly, the level of sophistication of stone tools is an indicator of causal belief.

Wolpert contends that the use of tools composed of more than one component, such as the hand axe, represents an ability to understand cause and effect forming the basis of a belief system.

56

Lewis Wolpert, The Evolutionary Origins of Belief (2006)

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The work by early humans would have been performed by necessity under some form of express or implied compulsion but also rewarded, if possible, with more or better food, more attractive mates or higher status within the group. Shirkers would have been subject to peer pressure and expulsion.

Common work alone would not have been enough to keep the group together. Thus, it is highly likely that the male bonding of the hunting party would have transferred to the work group, meaning that the male bonds would have been homo-erotic.

Familial bonds could also have been necessary for group cohesion. Indeed, with wandering male primates, the group’s stability is known to be based on female compulsion, perhaps through incestual ties. It is not unlikely that females would have fulfilled the expulsion function for the slackers. Within the extended familial group, members would also have been motivated by affiliation and approval. 57 57

Tiger, L. Dominance in Human Societies, Annual Review – Ecological Systems, Rutgers University (1970) https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.es.01.1101 70.001443?journalCode=ecolsys.1

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The work activity took place in a cave, as did paintings that were profoundly imbued with spiritual significance. Recent studies of the evolution of religion have revealed the cognitive underpinnings of belief in supernatural agents and the role of ritual in promoting cooperation. 58 No doubt the rituals of early working and religious practices were interconnected and part of the same beliefs in animism, the afterlife, shamanism and ancestor worship. The leader would have had shamanistic qualities and the working group would have been much like a cult with its own rituals and initiation rites. Members of the working cult derived satisfaction in their sense of belonging to an exclusive group, much as members of a political cult do, and possessed a sense of magical power as all cult members do, associated with members and the leader. The work, therefore, would have had intense spiritual qualities.

Would the leader have been the biggest and physically strongest in the group like the alpha male in some primate hierarchies? Not likely; after all Darwin did not say that the strongest survive. What he did say was “the species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself.� 59 However, some physical characteristics that complement superior social skills could very well have played a part in the leadership formula, such as compelling, expressive eyes and

58

Peoples, Duda & Marlowe, Hunter-Gatherers and the Origins of Religion (2016).

59

Charles Darwin, Origin of Species. The idea of survival of the fittest was invented by so-called Social Darwinists such as Herbert Spencer to explain what they believed to be immutable laws of human nature.

Such views formed a pillar of laissez-faire economics.

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attractive facial features. It has been observed in primates that all members of the group will glance at the leader every twenty to thirty 30 seconds, who is typically situated in the middle of the group. Physical proximity and touching were important bonding activities, perhaps becoming ritualistic in nature. 60 The tenor of the voice could have made a difference and perhaps body odor may have also played a part in bonding followers to the leader. Attractive as the leader would have been, would he have preferred to be loved or feared? What would have gotten the optimal results? Here we may refer to Niccolò Machiavelli who writes “a combination of the two would be the best, but that it is almost impossible to have both. Thus, he concludes that “since men love at their own choice and fear at the prince’s choice, a wise prince takes care to base himself on what is his own.”

Fear would have been the safer bet. 61 The workers’ tools were an extension of themselves, as toolmaking was a natural function of human nature. “From the very beginning of time, the ability to extend one’s corporeality (and therefore to alter one’s own material dimensions) has been the very condition of Homo faber.”62 The specialized, dexterous hands necessary to make tools have been with us for most of the evolutionary history of humans – about 1.5 million years – and are fundamental to survival. A combination of individually movable fingers, opposable thumbs and the ability to move the smallest finger and ring finger into the middle of the palm to meet the thumb 60

NY Times 10/6/2020 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/06/style/touch-deprivationcoronavirus.html?action=click&module=Features&pgtype=Homepage 61 62

Niccolò Machiavelli. The Prince.

Umberto Echo, Ibid.

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gives humans the dexterity that is unparalleled in the animal kingdom. An advanced neural network of eye-brain-hand would allow touching, gripping and seeing to work in concert. Further, toolmaking and tool use and the division of labor that followed which required sophisticated cognition and abstract reasoning, which in turn socialized roles and normative behaviors, eventually the wellspring of language, is the foundation of human culture. The hand and head were intimately connected. The grip is a voluntary decision and what is in the hand would trigger thoughts about the nature of what it holds. Naming what the hand holds would come next and finally reflecting on what one has done would follow. 63 Without toolmaking and tool use there could be no government, religion, art, or trade – no human culture. The division of labor produces the surplus necessary for a sustainable society and the specialized leadership roles of chief and shaman, later magistrate and priest, which are required.

The workday may have been measured by the traverse of the sun, giving birth to a sense of time, and the measuring the output of work product would have required some system of counting. If used for trade, some rate or value of exchange would have been necessary. A rest period would have been required because of the amount of physical and mental energy required in the performance of the work. In a 5-yearold child, maybe 40% of energy is used to maintain the brain, to keep it going In an adult, maybe 20% of all energy is used to maintain the brain. 64 We do not know much about the brains of early working humans but it is certain that the work 63

Sennett, R. The Craftsman (2008) pp. 150-53.

Wall Street Journal, Nov. 20, 2020 https://www.wsj.com/articles/isyour-brain-goofing-off-11605868200?mod=hp_lead_pos12 64

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would have been exhausting, requiring periods of rest and perhaps more bonding among the work group’s members.

This work, then, was performed by highly intelligent and skilled social beings using the best tools available and organized for efficiency. That is, to me, as good a definition of innovation and mastery as any. In fact, this group would have been at the leading edge of progress. Importantly, there would have to been a direct relationship between effort and reward and therefore a sense of meaning and purpose in the work. This would have led to greater self-awareness and a sense of the relationship between the person and nature, separate from, but a part of, “just as man is a particular expression of nature, an active, modifying expression who distinguishes himself from his environment, precisely because of his capacity to act upon it and defend it – a capacity that gives him the right to say ‘I’”. 65 The worker was truly human, a maker of his own history and an agent in building his culture; and this, then, would have been the meaning of work at this early stage of human history – to participate in history and to experience personhood in a culture of his own making. Having said this, it is doubtful that early humans did much work, at least in groups. 66 The group being cohesive by virtue of reward and ritual, members most likely organized when necessary.

But insofar as the present discussion is concerned, we may say that human labor was a function of biological need.

Bonding between males and females create the first cooperative groups. Through the use of tools, a human culture evolved, becoming ever more social and cooperative 65

Id. Schor, J. The Overworked American (1991) at p. 10 comparing Kapauku and Papua tribesmen who work one day and rest the next.

66

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to survive. Arts and crafts become ritualized and later specialized among both men and women and a division of labor creates a wider dimension to the primal emotions of love and fear. Human intelligence grows exponentially. A system of exchange develops based on reciprocal obligations. Socialization grows. The vicissitudes of a life subduing nature gives rise to an individual and common purpose on earth, whether to glorify God, to take part in the great tide of human events, or both. Mutual aid and protection become the means of realizing human potential.

Learning and skill development occur across generations.

Sustained and meaningful work becomes fundamental to individual and social identity and a way to participate in the building of human culture. Work and personhood are inseparable.

As noted, the first division of labor would have been based on sex. Women reared children and gathered wild plants, fetched sticks and rocks for the hearth and foraged for berries and nuts. They also developed sophisticated skills to weave baskets out of bark and reeds, fabricate garments from hides that they skinned and cured, and to master the kiln for the production of pottery. Tremendous cognitive ability and abstract reasoning were necessary to perform these complex design and fabrication functions, not to mention the physical agility, dexterity and coordination that would have been needed.

Complex social hierarchies emerged among women and their working groups; and some women would have also engaged in hunting when not working. 67 Women

67

Hesse-Biber, S. & carter, L.C. Working Women in America (2000) citing Anderson, K. Changing Women: A History of Racial and Ethnic Women (1996).

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would have also used tools for the cultivation of edible cereals, such as wild emmer, barley, and oats.

A more complex division of labor could not have appeared until group activity became sufficiently advanced to produce a surplus of food. Take the harvesting of honey, where one man would have specialized in making smoke to subdue the bees, another that climbs the trees, and others that act as support staff to lower combs. 68 Males would have also organized themselves according to their specialties and modify their groups based on the size of the game they are hunting. This specialized group hunting for larger prey would have positioned humans at the top of the food chain.

This power fueled ever more complex religious practices, totem rituals and ancestor worship.

As a domain became more or less self-sufficient with ever more advanced cultivation, fertile land became highly valuable. At that point a powerful sense of ownership would have emerged both of the land and of the surplus crop which would have needed protection from pillage. To this point, we have only hinted at how the surplus would have been secured and allocated. But as the institution of property emerged, it is certain it would have been translated into power for the leaders, including the astronomers and priests who were able to use their knowledge to maximize the harvest. 69 Greater surpluses would have led to greater power over people and 68

NY Times. Oct. 25, 2025 https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/27/science/nothing-simpleabout-hunter-gatherer-societies.html?smid=em-share 69

Agriculture required a profound knowledge of the natural world and the difficult task of squaring the lunar month with the solar year. The emergence of astronomy, the first science, and counting were essential to determine when to sow, when to reap and when to store.

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resources and it is here that agriculture emerges, and with it a class of forced labor to cultivate the field. Thus, the institution of slavery co-exists with the institution of property that resulted from the development of larger-scale agriculture. 70 As females were the first cultivators of the soil, it is highly likely that women would have comprised the first cohort of forced laborers. 71 Agricultural communities, however, were subject to raids for thousands of years. DNA evidence strongly suggests that through Western and Central Europe, nomadic tribes perpetuated large-scale killings of men, boys and possibly male infants. 72 Women were raped and subjugated as slaves.

Property, wealth and power accumulated in a few elite males. Thus, for thousands of years, humankind could not advance because of sexual violence, slavery and inequality.

As agriculture becomes the means to a thriving community, military raids become motivated as much by the subjugation of the enemy for slave labor as much for stealing the loot and food surplus. 73 And here, group members would have needed to codify the rule of law and form a governing body to protect people and property from outsiders and from attacks within the group on each other. At this point, social

70

Walter S. Neff. Work and Human Behavior (1968), p. 81.

In the sixth century, Iroquois women went on strike during harvest, refusing to make moccasins and also denying men sex to get a better deal. Marantz, A. “The Anti-Coup,� The New Yorker, Nov 23, 2020 at 40.

72 Preston, D. The Skeletal Lake. The New Yorker Dec. 14, 2020. See also Neff at 81-82 73 Women too were abducted as sex slaves and, at times, for the specific purpose of propagation and breeding.

71

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roles would have become institutionalized – chief, warrior, priest and so on. By the time the first city appeared, craft specialization had been achieved in pottery, woodworking, metallurgy textiles and construction. 74 We have conjectured that the early work group would have been cult-like with initiation rituals. The tools would have been sacred instruments. The boss would have shamanistic or would have possessed other charismatic qualities and obedience by the group members would have had powerful spiritual overtones. Obedience is a conscious act of submitting to authority and the obedient member would have been fearful of punishment when disobeying. All of Western religion starts from this point. So, to follow our allegory, we may accept that Adam’s descendants were cursed with work as a punishment for their disobedience. However, Adam’s and Eve’s disobedience was also their means of liberation and empowerment to build their own culture, pursue their own livelihoods and to create their own meaning through work. Man’s “fall” – his self-awareness, the basis of his original sin - was both his true awakening and his tragic downfall, his blessing and his curse. As such, we can confidently say that the work humans are forever compelled to perform is primarily not of his own free choice, as much as thrust upon him out of necessity. Unlike play, most of us work not because we want to; we work because we have to.

Only a few are blessed with work that is both loved and endured at the same.

74

Pollock, S. Working Lives in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Uruk-Period Mesopotamia (2009) https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/127599276.pdf

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3. Work and its Discontents It is true, that the size and complexity of modern industry and the advantages of mass production favor a maximum degree of conformity where workers are interchangeable.

And perhaps as an interchangeable market commodity, this work cannot fulfill human needs. But as we have seen, in any culture the rules are made by the dominate group. The dominant group, inevitably, has the greatest influence in 67 | P a g e

determining the culture’s philosophy, morality, social theory, laws and even its science. Freud supposedly had shown that this deterministic outlook was imbedded in the human psyche and incorporated into society’s guiding concepts and principles as the dominant group defines what is normal.

If Enron, WorldCom and other corporations managed essentially as racketeering enterprises are any indication of what passes as executive leadership in the modern corporation, the average corporate executive in America is a grossly overpaid bureaucrat, whose every decision and act violates the fiduciary duty of care owed to the organization and its shareholders. The executive’s cynicism and corruption infect his inner circle of well-paid lackeys and degrades the spirit of every employee. Of course, the leadership at Enron and WorldCom represents only a tiny fraction of American executives, but the probability of corruption, unethical practices and criminality is high in most corporate environments, primarily because managers almost always act in their own interests at the expense of the firm’s interest. Such is the case because executive and management leadership pose inherent conflicts of interest.

As Adam Smith described, “managers of other people's money [rarely] watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which . . . [they] watch over their own . . . [T]hey very easily give themselves a dispensation. Negligence and profusion must always prevail."

Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means coined the phrase "the separation of ownership and control" in their landmark 1932 book The Modern Corporation and Private Property, and it remains the most widely used expression in the voluminous literature on corporate governance. It refers to their 68 | P a g e

observation that during the nineteen twenties the structure of ownership in large corporations changed from the traditional arrangement of owners managing their own companies to one in which shareholders had become so numerous and dispersed that they were no longer willing or able to manage the corporations they owned.

The authors warned that the separation of ownership from control might enable controlling managers to increase their own wealth at the shareholders' expense, and that warning became the focus of fifty years of subsequent research in the economics literature. However, those same fifty years also witnessed dramatic changes in ownership concentration, stock trading strategies, and theories of corporate governance. Generally, most shareholders are not interested in being involved in the firm's business activities. These shareholders act like investors, not owners. The difference is subtle, but important. An owner is focused on the business performance of the firm. An investor is focused on the risk and return of his or her stock portfolio. Harold Williams, the former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, was more direct in his observation of shareholder responsibility and the long-term interests of the corporation when he stated “the traditional concept of the investor is becoming obsolete. The linkage between ownership and participation in the equity markets is to put it mildly - strained. Increasingly, the so-called investor is often nothing more than a short-term speculator in the company's income stream.�

The shareholders of a corporation are the principals, and the managers who run the company are the agents. If shareholders cannot effectively monitor the managers’ behavior, then the managers may be tempted to use the firm's 69 | P a g e

assets to increase their own lifestyle. Or, as James Burnham put it in his 1941 book The Managerial Revolution, managers will behave as if they are the owners. Executives may enjoy perks such as liberally charging the corporate expense account, chartering the company jet, ordering topgrain leather office equipment, and so on at the expense of shareholders. Of course, the criminal abuses of the last decade of the twenty century and beyond make these examples seem almost quaint.

Solutions to this problem tend to come in two categories: incentives and monitoring. The incentive solution is to create situations in which the executive's wealth is tied to the wealth of the shareholders. That way, the executives and the shareholders want the same thing. This is called aligning executive incentives with the shareholders. Executives would then act and behave in a way that is also best for the other shareholders. For most U.S. companies, executives are given stock and/or stock options as a significant component of their pay. Executives who are rewarded in this way experience increasing pay packages as the value of the firm’s stock goes up. For nearly two decades, which ended in the Panic of 2008, much of the value of a wide swath of American corporations was highly leveraged, based on money borrowed against future earnings. Executives made out handsomely as such borrowing inflated stock prices, making a mockery of such quaint notions of investing for production. With nothing really to produce other than financial returns, borrowing finally reached unsustainable levels, as the market ruthlessly re-evaluated and re-priced stocks, telling each executive what their real value to the firm really was.

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Excessive CEO compensation has, of course, been fueled by this paper wealth. In 1980, the ratio of executive compensation to the pay of the average workers was 40 to 1.

By 2008, the ratio was 300 to 1. CEO’s made about ten times the compensation of even the second-highest executive in the firm. Advocates for such high compensation argue that boards of directors are paying CEO’s for their return of value to shareholders. But over the quarter century, the U.S. economy has been awash in cash. In turn, stock prices were heavily influenced by speculators’ expectations that other speculators would continue to bid a stock up. In this way, stock prices are not related to value at all. Thus, many CEO’s are not paid to create long term value; instead, they are paid to achieve short term returns. Of course, these returns represent a big piece of executive compensation.

Most top executives are not entrepreneurs. In fact, most corporate executives have been groomed since business school to please the boss and follow the crowd. While the corporate mantra may be innovation and leadership, most executives are subject to “groupthink.” In his classic book, Groupthink, Irving L. Janis, the Yale psychologist, explained how panels of experts could make colossal mistakes. People on these panels, he observed, are forever worrying about their personal relevance and effectiveness, and feel that if they deviate too far from the consensus, they will not be given a relevant role. They self-censor doubts about the group consensus and eventually conform to the assumptions held by the group.

Once the executive becomes part of the inner circle, the pressure to conform is more powerful still. Since the executive’s performance is evaluated more and more on predetermined outcomes, pleasing the boss becomes more 71 | P a g e

important that doing a good job. Thus, creating a good impression with the boss is scored higher than competence.

In the end, the executive that is promoted is the one that has expressed the most inauthentic behavior and deception.

During their entire corporate careers they have spun all facts and viewpoints in directions they believe will most please the boss. In short, “corporate ethics� becomes an oxymoron as much of what passes as executive development, particularly the performance improvement process, is inherently unethical. As noted by Samuel Culvert, a professor of management at UCLA: I believe it's immoral to maintain the facade that annual pay and performance reviews lead to corporate improvement when it's clear they lead to more bogus activities than valid ones. Instead of energizing individuals, they are dispiriting and create cynicism. Instead of stimulating corporate effectiveness, they lead to just-in-case and cover-yourbehind activities that reduce the amount of time that could be put to productive use. Instead of promoting directness, honesty and candor, they stimulate inauthentic conversations in which people cast self-interested pursuits as essential company activities.

The net result is a resource violation, and I think citations should be issued. If it's a publicly held company, shareholder value gets decreased. If it's a governmental organization, time is 72 | P a g e

lost that could be spent in pursuit of the public good.

In is wholly unclear that given the culture and organizational structure of corporations and other bureaucracies whether high level executives are capable of acting at a high moral level. For example, corporate executives do not invest their own money. They take no risks with their own money. With lucrative severance agreements, their risk of failure becomes a certainty for reward. By 2007 the U.S. financial industry debt was equivalent to 116 percent of GNP, compared with a mere 21 percent in 1980. Having accumulated debts beyond what were sustainable, financial institutions were forced to reduce them, leading to one trillion dollars in writedowns in 2008 alone. As credit markets, the lifeblood of the economy froze, the federal government took the unprecedented step of taking equity stakes in the nation’s largest financial institutions in return for cash, to some extent nationalizing a segment of the banking industry. In return for the infusion of capital, banks were required, among other things, to limit incentives for the top five executives, accept claw-backs for financial irregularities, and prohibit the use of so-called golden parachute payments for executives.

The demise of WorldCom and its chief executive officer Bernard Ebbers presaged this massive market realignment and demonstrate how modern corporate structure turns “corporate ethics� into an oxymoron. As legend has it, in 1983 partners led by Ebbers, a former basketball coach, sketched out their idea for a long distance company on a napkin in a coffee shop in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Their company Long Distance Discount Service (LDDS) began providing service as a long distance reseller in 1984. For fifteen years it grew quickly through acquisitions and 73 | P a g e

mergers. Ebbers was named chief executive officer in 1985 and the company went public in August 1989. Its $40 billion merger with MCI in 1998 was the largest in history at the time. In 1999, WorldCom’s stock reached its highest price at $96.75 per share. Both the company and its chief executive officer were highly celebrated. With one hundred dollars invested in 1989, an investor would have enjoyed a return $6,000 only a decade later. In 1998 alone, the company’s stock appreciated 137 percent. A year later Fortune and the Wall Street Journal declared the company and its chief executive officer a great American success story.

In October 1999, WorldCom attempted to purchase Sprint in a stock buyout for $129 billion in stock and debt. The deal was vetoed by the U.S. Department of Justice. At the same time, WorldCom’s “success” began to unravel with the accumulation of debt and expenses, the fall of the stock market, long distance rates and revenue. Within a few years, WorldCom stock fell below one dollar per share and the company filed at the time the biggest bankruptcy in history.

WorldCom had improperly booked $3.8 billion as capital expenditures, boosting cash flow and profit over at least five quarters. This disguised the actual net loss for 2001 and the first quarter of 2002. In simple terms WorldCom did not account for expenses when it incurred them but hid the expenses by pushing them into the future, giving the appearance of spending less and therefore making more money. In 2003, a court-appointed bankruptcy examiner described the company as having a “culture of greed.”

Additionally, a special investigation committee report asked why no one disclosed or complained about management

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misconduct. The report averred: “the answer seems to lie partly in the culture.”

But in many respects, WorldCom’s culture resembled that of any other corporation where the interests of shareholders and executive leadership were aligned. The company’s mission statement was straightforward: “Our mission is to be the most profitable, single-source provider of communications services to customers around the world’ – in other words, the mission of the firm was to increase shareholder value.

Organizational goals were aligned with this mission. Each department had to meet financial goals and wherever possible, individual managers would be held responsible for not meeting his or her quarterly numbers.

Departments were organized as cost centers, competing against each other over budgets and other resources. Sharing resources across departments was not encouraged unless it could be billed against the other. If managers missed goals for one month, they were warned. Three consecutive months of missing revenue targets resulted in discharge. According to the Committee report, managers’ performance evaluations were based on achieving the “right results” with no emphasis on whether these results were achieved the “right way.” In short, executive leadership was deterministic and resultsoriented. The underlying philosophy was the “ends justify the means.” The executive team’s moral justification for this philosophy was essentially utilitarian – the greater good was served by countless individual acts of deceit. And like most corporations, the organizational structure was hierarchical and command-and-control. Management’s primary tool for control was power and primary methods of motivation were external rewards and punishment. The company was a big hit with investors and Wall Street analysts.

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At WorldCom, as is the case at many corporations, employees worked for material reward – a paycheck. As such, the relationship that most managers had to their work had no higher purpose than a paycheck. While perhaps leaving employees disconcerted or disconnected, their work life flowed from bureaucratic rules, without space for free will. Thus, when Betty Vinson, a mid-level accountant pleaded guilty to securities fraud her lawyer described her as a “victim of unscrupulous higher managers.� She was only following orders. She lacked the autonomy to make an independent decision.

The word autonomy has several usages in philosophical contexts. In ethics, autonomy refers to a person's capacity for self-determination in the context of moral choices. Kant argued that autonomy is demonstrated by a person who decides on a course of action out of respect for moral duty.

That is, an autonomous person acts morally solely for the sake of doing "good", independently of other incentives. In his Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, Kant applied this concept to create a definition of personhood. He suggested that such compliance with moral law creates the essence of human dignity. In metaphysical philosophy, the concept of autonomy is referenced in discussions about free will, fatalism, determinism, and agency.

Conformity can be viewed as a model society which argues that the best world is one in which there are few disruptions, where conflict is rare or even nonexistent. The best way to achieve this is for people to conform to particular ideals or ways of acting. The goal is for smooth, undisrupted functioning.

Since corporations insist on conformity, autonomy, can be, and usually is to one extent or another, waived to another authority, such as by agreeing to follow governing laws. In a corporation, an employee may cede 76 | P a g e

autonomy and agree to conform as a condition of employment. Further, the free will of an employee can be restricted by a more powerful authority, such as when the boss makes a demand to work over time. The decisions of employees can also be coerced and the actions of employees’ can be forced. Thus, when Betty Vinson, a mid-level accountant at WorldCom pleaded guilty to securities fraud her lawyer described her as a “victim of unscrupulous higher managers.” She was only following orders. She had no choice, no capacity to decide.

One of the most famous (or infamous) studies of obedience in psychology was carried out by Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University. He conducted an experiment focusing on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience. In 1963, Milgram examined justifications for acts of genocide offered by those accused at the Nuremberg War Criminal trials after the Second World War. . Their defense often was based on "obedience” - that they were just following orders from their superiors. The experiments began a year after the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram devised the experiment to answer the question: Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?

Milgram placed an advertisement in a newspaper asking for “500 New Haven men to help us complete a scientific study of memory and learning.” Over the next two years, hundreds of people showed up at Milgram’s lab for a learning and memory study that was really a study of obedience to authority. Under Milgram’s the watch, a volunteer, called the “the teacher,” would read out strings of words to his partner, “the learner,” who was supposedly hooked up to an 77 | P a g e

electric-shock machine in the other room. Each time the learner made a mistake in repeating the words, the teacher was to deliver a shock of increasing intensity, starting at 15 volts (labeled “slight shock” on the machine) and going all the way up to 450 volts (“Danger: severe shock”). Some people, horrified at what they were being asked to do, stopped the experiment early, defying their supervisor’s urging to go on; others continued up to 450 volts, even as the learner pled for mercy, yelled a warning about his heart condition—and then fell alarmingly silent. In the most wellknown variation of the experiment, a full 65 percent of people went all the way.

Controversially, Milgram concluded that ordinary people are likely to follow orders given by an authority figure, even to the extent of killing an innocent human being. People tend to obey orders from other people if they recognize their authority as morally right and/or legally based. This response to legitimate authority is learned in a variety of situations, for example in the family, school, and workplace.

Milgram summed up his conclusions in the article The Perils of Obedience, writing: Stark authority was pitted against the subjects’ [participants’] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects’ [participants’] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not.

The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes

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the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation. 75 Vinson and others engaged in malfeasance and passed off the responsibility for the consequences to the person giving the orders. In other words, they acted as agents for another person’s will. As agents, they did not direct their own actions and certainly did not take responsibility for the results of those actions. But what of the human desire for morality? Lawrence Kohlberg (1971) has focused on moral development and has proposed a stage theory of moral thinking from childhood to adulthood. In Kohlberg's first stage, the child assumes that powerful authorities hand down a fixed set of rules which he or she must unquestioningly obey. At this stage, the child defers to superior power or prestige. In other words, the child conforms. There is no substantive notion of free will or self-determination. His or her primary concern is receiving rewards and avoiding punishment.

Viewed through the lenses of Kant and Kohlberg, Vinson lacked free will and was operating at the moral level of a child. However, within WorldCom’s culture, Vinson was also acting rationally. She as well as her co-conspirators simply calculated that that the damage caused by their unethical and criminal actions to each shareholder was minuscule while the benefits to them were enormous. In other words, unethical acts at most corporations are the rational, self-interested, things to do. Moreover, the managers’ and shareholders’ interest are aligned because the paramount interest of both shareholders and managers is to increase the value of the stock - regardless of the true value of the firm. Both are concerned with the performance of the 75

Milgram, S. (1974)

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share - rather than the performance of the firm. Both are preoccupied with boosting the share's price - rather than the company's value.

Subordinates are usually said to be unable to perform preferred, elite roles. Their incapacity is often ascribed to innate defects and deficiencies that are immutable and impossible to change. This is what is called social Darwinism. To Herbert Spencer, the celebrated and influential English social scientist, inherited social traits were more or less predetermined by evolution. His advocacy for social Darwinism was adopted by the elite of American society, industrialists, academics, physicians, jurists, the clergy and the rest. “Partly by weeding out those of lowest development, and partly by subjecting those who remain to the never ceasing discipline of competition, nature secures the growth of the race who shall both understand the conditions of existence and be able to act upon them.” 76 John Kenneth Galbraith summed up the concept of “survival of the fittest” as an American creed: “Economic society was an area in which men could compete. The terms of the struggle were established in the market. Those who won were rewarded with survival and, if they survived brilliantly, with riches. Those who lost were thrown to the lions. This competition not only selected the strong but developed their faculties and ensured their perpetuation. And in eliminating the weak, it ensured that they would not reproduce their kind.

Thus, the struggle was socially benign and, to a point at least, the more merciless, the more benign its effects, for the weaklings it combed out.” 77

76 77

Sarno, J. The Perils of Prosperity citing Social Statics, pp. 143.

Galbraith, J.K. The Affluent Society (1958).

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By the end of the nineteenth century, laissez faire market economics and social Darwinism had metastasized into Eugenics, another pseudo-scientific doctrine that was less benign as social Darwinism as it actively advocated the elimination of “unfit persons” particularly people with dishabilles who were routinely labeled as “mere animals,” “sub-human creatures” and “waste products” who were draining society’s resources and producing only “pauperism, degeneracy, and crime,” 78 Eugenics was robustly practiced in the United States, a combination of civic-mindedness and a belief in “science” that could solve the problems of an anxious society. The American Eugenics Society was formed and twenty-nine local chapters sprung up around the country. Race Betterment Foundations were set up by philanthropists. At county fairs, eugenic exhibits spread the word and hosted “fitter family” and “better baby” competitions to award ribbons to the finest human stock. A poster at the Kansas State Fair illustrated the basic premise of the Eugenics movement. It read: “You can improve your education, and even change your environment, but what you really ARE was settled down when your parents were born.

Selected parents will have better children.” 79 More than half the states enacted sterilization laws inspired by eugenic ideals. Sixty thousand Americans were sterilized under state law, including Carrie Buck in Virginia, who challenged the constitutionality of the law. In 1923, the Supreme Court of the United States upheld the Virginia sterilization law, with Justice Holmes writing the majority opinion. “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from 78 79

Sarno, Id. pp. 143-144.

Id. at 144 citing Black, E. War Against the Weak (2003)

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continuing their kind� he wrote. Justifying state legislation to promote the general health and welfare of the public, Holmes concluded that the principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover the Fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.�

Public health officials classified mental defectives and assigned them to various jobs. For example, a Low Grade Imbecile was suited for simple menial work; a Medium Imbecile could perform simple manual work; a High Grade Imbecile could perform complex manual work and the Moron was suited for work requiring reasoning and

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judgment. 80 Thus, imbeciles and morons did factory work but would only be paid a subsistence wage.81

Wages would only go up when a scarcity of workers drove up the price of labor. Hewing closely to Smith, Marx explains how the capitalist buys the worker’s labor power by paying him a wage, sells whatever the worker makes and pockets the difference as profit. Working a typical twelvehour day, the worker only needs to work six of the those hours to produce the basics of his survival – food, clothing and shelter – to replenish his “muscle, nerve and brain” to keep working. “He creates surplus-value which, for the capitalist, has the charms of creating something out of nothing.” The wage makes all labor performed during the twelve-hour workday appear compensated but in reality, the 80

https://www.sciencephoto.com/media/600363/view/researchused-by-eugenicists-1913 81

Apparently having its fill of idiots, the Immigration Act of 1891 banned them, along with insane persons, paupers and others from entering the United States.

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owner is getting six hours of free labor. Together, with “the magic of machinery� the worker produces more with less, making himself redundant and ultimately eliminating his job. Given that the displaced worker is too helpless for even charity, his fate is to be thrown onto the scrapheap with other defective parts. German film director Fritz Lang portrayed this gruesome process in the 1927 film Metropolis.

Marching like dim-witted automatons up the vast steps of an insatiable industrial combine, redundant workers are swallowed alike as they enter Moloch ’s portal. After the First World War, communists and others were quick to point out that industrial capitalism in its advanced state constituted nothing less than an inhuman system at its best and a technological slaughterhouse at its worst.

As for race, racial characteristics encompassed more than skin color, but also included ancestry and ethnicity. As such, many immigrants, particularly from southern and eastern 84 | P a g e

Europe were considered non-White, and therefore inferior.

For example, in 1890, Popular Science Magazine carried an article entitled "What Should We Do with the Dago?" As for Eastern Europeans, a prominent turn-of-the-century physician argued that Slavs were "immune to certain kinds of dirt. They could stand what would kill a white man."

Major newspapers badgered immigrants from southern and eastern Europe as carriers of “loathsome diseases of the flesh” along with “ignorance and Bolshevism.” 82 Of Polish Jews, the bestselling book The Passing of the Great Race, argued that Jews diminished "the stock of the nation" with their "dwarf stature, peculiar mentality and ruthless concentration of self-interest." Immigrants from Latin America were said to be “rotten with various diseases.”83 A popular cartoon of the time called The Last Yankee drawn by Thomas Nast (who also popularized the image Santa Claus) was published widely. It portrayed a straight, tall, virtuous American (which was later used as Uncle Sam during the First World War) being crowded out by foreigners with exaggerated racial and ethnic characteristics. This vicious stereotyping and obvious prejudice resulted in blatant job discrimination. Many fretted about immigrants taking away jobs. For example, rather than seeking to organize immigrants, unions blamed them for job loss and low wages.

Labor unions often represented immigrants as "a menace to the American standard of living." Immigrants were systematically threatened and harassed on the job by other workers that resented their willingness to work for lower wages. The message was clear: while immigration was necessary to fuel economic expansion, too much immigration, particular "non-white" immigration was an 82

Witt, J.F. American Contagion (2020) at P. 51, internal citation omitted.

83 Id.

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economic, social and biological threat to the nation. In 1924, immigration law established racial quotas, severely restricting entry from any country that did not have AngloSaxon demographics. The law was enforced for four decades until replaced.

The Nazi’s showed the world what eugenics, racial theory and forced labor looked like in combination with an efficient state bureaucracy. Arbeit macht free - "Work sets you free" - was the slogan appearing on the entrance of Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps. The use of forced labor in the German-occupied countries during the Second World War took place on an unprecedented scale. Broken down by race, nationality and function, German records listed 7.6 million foreign forced laborers in 1944. It is estimated that at least 34,140 Eastern European women were forced into sex slavery for German troops. Millions of Jews were forced laborers in Eastern European ghettoes before shipped off to extermination camps. The total number of forced laborers under Nazi rule who were still alive as 1999 was about 2.3 million, most of whom received some form of compensation from the German government.

The Soviets, too, demonstrated to the world how “work, the miracle worker, transforms people from nonexistence and insignificance to heroes.” In the labor camps, men and women worked until exhaustion and often death. Women in particular, who worked in the mines, in the fields and at all manner of hard labor became physically deformed, transformed from a women objectified by the doctors who examined her upon her arrival to the camp, who “smacked their lips at her undressing” to the person who becomes wrinkled, stooped, gaunt, emaciated and sallow seemingly

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overnight. Her life is greatly shortened in the camp and if sickness doesn’t kill her, the work surely will. 84 Within the culture, subordinates, more or less, voluntarily agree to their subservience. Even totalitarian regimes have the consent of their citizens. Subordinates come to believe in their deficient natures or act in ways that meet the expectations of the dominants to survive, in either case perpetuating the rules and norms of the dominant culture.

Subordinates who do not comply with these norms are deemed abnormal. To hold a job is normal. There is simply no room in this worldview for free choice, a person must have a job or be seen as a failure. Over the decades most industrial work and office work that has been routinized by machines and technology is thought to be the result of the natural, predetermined processes of the market. The job market is seen as subject to the strict rules of market competition and the jobs performed much like those performed within the stratified ranks of a medieval caste system. 85 As Brink Lindsey has observed and who I think deserves to quoted here at length: In the contemporary knowledge economy, the critical determinate of economic success is a welldeveloped capacity for abstract thinking, which makes possible long-term planning, large – scale organization, and use of specialized knowledge, At the low end of the skills continuum, members of an 84

Solzhenitsyn, A. The Gulag Archipelago (1975) 189-190.

The most enduring caste system remains in India, where the division of labor is predetermined. Occupations are set forth with rigid precision in the Laws of Manu and other ancient Hindu religious texts.

The Western equivalent to the Laws of Manu is the Old Testament.

See Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020).

85

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underclass operate within a narrow time horizon and circles of trust that their lives are plagued by chronic chaos and dysfunction. At the high end, members of the managerial and professional elite amass high levels of human capital in the form of expertise and relationships, which allow them to produce significant economic value and claim commensurate rewards. 86 We may well reflect on the above passage as a reasonable interpretation of the modern job market but it could also precisely describe the early toolmaker, the “knowledge worker� of his time with highly developed faculties of abstract reasoning and abilities to plan and organize. Early humans were by nature, knowledge workers, eventually specializing for greater and greater output. Later craft workers and artisans guarded their secrets and protected their market share through guilds. Knowledge and skills were passed down through the apprentice system. The factory system needed a division of labor that was not skilled. As industrial work required more and more routine, the worker lost control of his livelihood, his human capital. Later, large corporate firms bureaucratized work, creating committees and teams, thus putting a premium on conformity. By midtwentieth century, for most Americans work had become a job and for many, a dead end one at that.

At the height of the mid-twentieth century critique of capitalism and consumerist Western culture overall, William Whyte published The Organization Man. While employed

by Fortune Magazine, Whyte did extensive interviews with the chief executive officers of major American corporations.

A central tenet of the book is that average Americans 86

Lindsey, B. The Age of Abundance (2007).

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subscribed to a conformist ethic rather than to the notion of individualism. A key point made was that people became convinced that organizations and groups could make better decisions than individuals, and thus serving an organization, a corporate employer, became rationally preferable to advancing one's individual creativity.

His initial research focused on why big companies achieved only mediocre results from their research and development departments what he called “the great slough of mediocrity that is mot of corporate research.” He observed two exceptions: General Electric and Bell Labs, which were “the most tolerant of individual differences, the most patient with off-target ideas, and the least given to immediate, closely supervised team projects . . . [I]t was enough that the scientists do superbly well what they want to do.” In short, the work of the scientists approached the artisanal ideal of individuality and creativity, reinforcing the sense of pleasure in the work itself.

Wilhelm Reich poses the contrast starkly: “Two basic types of work can be differentiated with satisfying exactness: work that is compulsive and does not give any pleasure and work that is natural and pleasurable.” 87 Most work is unpleasurable because it is not an act of choice, rather it is a condition imposed by the market economy and industrialism and not the consequence of natural impulse or desire. It is a take-it-or-leave-it arrangement. Work as an expression of love and devotion is rarer still, reserved for artists and other creative workers. As work and sexuality are interwoven, the average worker can only be frustrated and unhappy on the job.

87

Wilhelm Reich. The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1946).

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In his monumental treatise on the philosophy of commerce, the market and society, The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, Adam Smith describes how the division of labor in “a very trifling manufacturer,” a pin factory, allowed ten workers skilled in only one aspect of production to produce forty-eight thousand pins in a day where one worker who was responsible for the entire process would have produced “perhaps not one pin in a day.” 88 No doubt Smith was a bit exuberant in his promotion of efficient shop organization but he described in detail how one worker drew the wire, another straightens it, a third cuts it, a fourth points the pin, a fifth grinds it at the top as the process continues through the workday requiring about eighteen distinct operations. As for the worker, Smith acknowledges that the monotonous and repetitive work makes them dull and ignorant which may result in “mental mutilation.” so that they cannot suggest improvements to the tools that they use because the worker ‘loses the habit of invention and generally becomes stupid and ignorant as possible for a human creature to become.” 89 Sadly, improvements to the tools and machinery are made by their makers so that the workers are unable to take any share in the productivity gained from those improvements.

Their work has been dumbed-down to achieve maximum production and their wages will hardly ever go up resulting in a permanent laboring class “incapable of engaging in the affairs of citizenship and unable to defend the country in time of war. But, he rationalized, in every improved and civilized society this is the state of the laboring poor, that is,

88

Smith, A. The Wealth of Nations, Bantam Classic Edition (2003), pp.

10-11.

89 Id. at 29-30.

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the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it.”

To Smith, the division of labor is what separates humans from other animals, although it seems to replicate hierarchies that he may have observed in nature. The division of labor is not the result of “any human wisdom;” instead it is a consequence of human nature, especially of reason and speech. “It is common to all men, and not to be found in no other race of animal.” 90 His basic insight is that the division of labor arises from the human “propensity to truck, barter and exchange on thing for the other.” He explains that to get what we need in the world, we address ourselves to the selflove of others, we flatter, scrape and bow and appeal to the other’s vanity. “As it is by a treaty, by barter, and by purchase, that we obtain from one another the greater part of those material good offices which we stand in need of, do it is a trucking disposition which originally gives occasion to the division of labor. In a tribe of hunters or shepherds,” Smith conjectures, “a particular person makes bows and arrows, for example, with more readiness and dexterity than any other. He frequently exchanges them for cattle or venison with his companions. . . From a regard for selfinterest, therefore, the making of bows and arrows grows to be his chief business, and he becomes a sort of armorer. “ 91 Smith’s insight into specialization is as good as any. It has been elaborated on by others and the archeological evidence suggests that the organized trading of objects between tribes occurred at least 30,000 years ago. 92 Smith describes how an economy of scale emerges over time, presumably with 90

Id. at p. 22.

Id. 92 Yuval, N. Sapiens. (2015).

91

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individual specialists barter themselves into a cooperative group eventually creating a “multiplication of the production of different arts.” However, at some point these specialists would require coordination to create the scale necessary for greater production to support a growing, thriving community. In short, to progress, work would have to be socialized and, as we have seen in early human work groups, work would require some degree of compulsion.

For some social scientists, free choice has been put on a pedestal, reserved only for people such as themselves or who they aspire to be, the rich, the powerful and a few craftsmen, artists, scientists and other creative workers, unattainable for cogs-in-the-wheel. As Hannah Arendt has pointed out, in the classical world, slaves were degraded because they performed labor while citizens of the republic engaged in politics, philosophy, art and war. In Classical Greece and Rome to be compelled to labor was the equivalent of being subhuman. “The institution of slavery in antiquity, though not in later times, was not a device for cheap labor or an instrument of exploitation for profit, but rather the attempt to exclude labor from the condition of man’s life.” 93 For Arendt, the difference between “labor” and “work” is that labor is performed out of necessity, while work is done to leave an imprint on the world. Labor is a form of degradation, as opposed to work, which is a virtuous activity engaged in by autonomous craftsmen and artisans. Labor “is what animals do.” This, of course, is true, as labor is a function of biology. A more human condition is autonomous work, the work of the craftsman and artisan, and the time it 93

Hannah Arendt. The Human Condition (1958). Even today, the dystopian dream of a workless society lives on with the promoters of robotics and artificial intelligence.

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gives for civic engagement, the ideal of self-ownership and self-governance. By this standard, much of the work performed today has its roots in forced or coerced labor. 94 Blame rests with the capitalist industrial system which alienated work and is therefore inhumane. Marx, Fromm and Marcuse were nostalgic for a romantic era, which, of course, never truly existed at least for the mass of the working population. Marx and Friedrich Engels published the Communist Manifesto contemporaneously with, and reaction to, the great political and social upheaval throughout most the European continent in 1848-1849.

Throughout France, Italy, Germany, Austria, Poland, Hungary, the Czech lands and Slovakia, monarchies were under siege by republicans, democrats, workers’ groups and communists. It was a time of profound transition from a preindustrial to industrial society. On the cusp of widespread industrialization, the working classes were not a cohesive group. The majority were not factory hands amenable to the internationalist communist motto – “Workers of the World Unite!” – but artisans and craftsmen working in small shops.

They already owned the means of their production and were not interested in abolishing private property. They were skilled and had aspirations to independence and therefore avoided becoming part of the industrial proletariat, that growing mass of unskilled or semi-skilled workers. 95 As 94

Arbeit macht frei – work will set you free – a slogan appearing on the entrance of Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps.

Before the Second World War, the slogan was used in Germany in programs to reduce mass unemployment. During the mass slaughter of the Jews and others it was deployed as perverse and sadistic irony.

95

Rapport, M. 1848 (2008) p. 212-13

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such, the craft workers sought to defend their own interests not in class war but through traditional methods such as guilds and fraternities. Mostly articulate and literate, skilled workers found little in the communist program relevant to them.

Yet, the communist leagues relied on what they believed to be the inevitability of industrialism producing a mass working class which they would raise to social consciousness and lead in the final confrontation with the old regimes and the capitalist state. When the master artisans refused to sign on to such a radical program, it split the reform parties. The monarchs and military re-asserted themselves in a brutal two-year campaign of war and terror.

The artisan and craft programs combined traditional approaches and progressive reform that would seed labor movements in the future. Essentially the program was one of protectionism and self-help. They wanted a fair share of government contracts and cheap credit to invest in small scale technology. In addition, they wanted the restoration and preservation of the guild system of controlling labor, production and prices. They also called for a progressive income tax, pensions and the right to work to ensure that everyone could provide for themselves and their families.

The Berlin Central Workers’ Committee also demanded free education for all, so that eventually workers could be elected to parliament. It also proposed a commission of both workers and employers to prevent labor disputes. “There was no talk of nationalization, or of taking private property; rather the program was the cry of the craft workers against industrialism, a protest against de-skilling of the artisan, forced by economic pressure to abandon his trade and submit to the factory, the disciple of the relentless pace of the 94 | P a g e

machine or to the new rhythms of work imposed by entrepreneurs. “ 96 Indeed, some English textile workers resorted to destroying machines in their protests manufacturers who deployed them in what they called "a fraudulent and deceitful manner.”

These artisans rightfully feared that the time spent learning the skills of their craft would go to waste, as machines would replace their role in the industry. Many were owners of workshops that had closed because factories sold the same products for less. But when workshop owners applied for jobs at the factory, they were told by the owners that they were overqualified.

As much of Europe was convulsed in unrest, the United States was also confronting its potential dissolution over immigration and slavery. Between the eighteen – thirties and the outbreak of the Civil War, there were at least thirty-five major riots in Northeast cities directed at Black people, immigrants, Native Americans, abolitionists and Catholics.

Territorial expansion, war with Indian tribes and war with Mexico delayed the day of reckoning. Territorial expansion was based on white mobility. Artisans and small producers opposed slavery because it was impossible to compete against free labor. Many worked to enact laws to keep Black Americans – free or slave – out of the territories and the new states that were admitted to the Union. 97 When the Supreme Court of the United States held that Black Americans – free or slave – had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect,” few white working people objected. 98 Indeed, 96

Id at 116-117.

Sixty thousand free inhabitants of a territory could petition for statehood.

98 Dred Scott v. Sanford (1854).

97

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antebellum New York City profited greatly from the rendition to the South of escaped slaves who sought freedom in the North.

No doubt Marx and the communists despised the artisans and craftsmen of Europe for their conservatism. However, Marx shrewdly flattered their traditions of honorable work and small-scale manufacturing, holding them up again and again as the worker ideal. To this day, academics and social scientists speak of the artisanal ideal, believing that the mass of workers could reach their full potential if only they owned the means of their own production. Only then would they free themselves from being a "crippled monstrosity.� Marx's concept of labor as an expression of man's individuality is succinctly expressed in his vision of the abolition of the division of labor and the market exchange. Since the aim of human development is that of the development of the total, universal man, man must be emancipated from the crippling influence of specialization. In all previous societies, Marx writes, man has been "a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic." 99 Inspired by socialist ideal in the early to mid-twentieth century, Fromm extolled the romance of the Renaissance as the ideal era of creative work and surely it was a fervent 99

Marx, Ibid at 197-98.

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period of European cultural, artistic, political and economic “rebirth� following the Middle Ages. 100 Inspired early on by the golden age of Classical Greece and Rome, some of the greatest thinkers, authors, statesmen, scientists and artists in human history thrived during this era, while global exploration opened up new lands and cultures to European commerce.

Art, architecture and science were closely linked among the geniuses of the time, synthesized in I secular creed of humanism, excellence and invention, funded mostly by popes, monarchs, nobles and a wealthy elite.

Renaissance society was strictly stratified, generally comprising of five social classes: rulers of royal lineage, the nobles, the merchants, the tradesmen and the unskilled workers, both men and women.

The tradesmen, and women, were the craft workers artisans and shopkeepers.

Most tradesmen belonged to guilds. Laborers did not have job protection and were dependent on their employers. They were paid subsistence wages, although during the waves of plague deaths, wages would go up due to a shrinking labor pool. Workers who violated labor rules could have their wages withheld or could be discharged from their jobs or jailed. Peasants and slaves also made up part of the working class, including women who were wet nurses, house servants and field hands. Many turned to prostitution to make ends meet. 101 Venereal diseases were an epidemic scourge. 102

100

See Mike Wallace interview with Erich Fromm. May 25, 1958 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTu0qJG0NfU 101 102

Bartlett, K. The Civilization of the Italian Renaissance (1992).

Partner, P. Renaissance Rome (1976).

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Prices for food and other necessities fluctuated widely, triggering famine in both the cities and the countryside.

Beggars were commonplace on city streets. Guilds often went on strike demanding higher prices for their goods.

Labor organizers were arrested, jailed and even executed for causing civil disorder. Jews, while permitted to practice the trades, were treated as social and civic inferiors and were subject to special taxes. Most were segregated into ghettos.

Constant warfare and political strife disrupted commerce, upended social relations and dislodged workers from their homes, and the specter of disease and pandemic haunted generations of nobles and peasants alike. Famine, war and plague were the chief forces of population control.

It is, of course, the stupendous cultural achievements in the arts and sciences during the two centuries of the Renaissance that we rightly venerate. The society transitioned from feudalism to capitalism, at least in the urban areas, freeing many to pursue independent occupations.

In the countryside, feudal serfdom persisted for two centuries more. The nature of work changed as a middle class of craftsmen, artisans and professionals emerged. Even though life was one long hardship for the vast majority of the Renaissance population, it is the image of the heroic humanistic artisans that is firmly fixed in our collective imagination and stand as our sublime ideal of an independent, autonomous worker.

When this feverish utopian dream caught the fancy of Western intellectuals after the Second World War, particularly during the decade the 1950s, an onslaught of criticism was unleashed against what was viewed as an overly commercial and conformist culture, void of creativity and individuality. "In capitalism economic activity, success, 98 | P a g e

material gains become ends in themselves. It becomes man's fate to contribute to the growth of the economic system, to amass capital, not for purposes of his own happiness or salvation, but as an end in itself. Man became a cog in the vast economic machine - an important one if he had much capital, and insignificant one if had none - but always a cog to serve a purpose outside of himself." 103 Without doubt, work can be a blessing when it is undertaken voluntarily, as an act of free will, when it is part of both the person and the society. Through work, individuals can become one with the world, a part of human history and culture. But work can be a curse when it is unfree, when it becomes compulsory, forced on the individual under threat of punishment or even death. Work can be an expression of freedom or an instrument of slavery. We have seen how labor becomes work with the division of labor but even then, it can be motivated by powerful psychological impulses. But at some point we must deal with work becoming employment, subject to a market bargain and an exchange of work for remuneration, what many have called alienated work. But for now, at least insofar as work is both blessing and a curse, voluntary and compulsory combined, it seems to me that at some point work becomes social institution and social compact between individuals each other and within a group But before we launch that discussion, we must still plumb the psychological line.

While this is not the time or place to provide a discourse on psychoanalysis, we are concerned primarily with work that is derived by both free choice and necessity. In psychoanalytic terms, love and work are nearly inseparable ideas, governed by Eros, a metaphor for the power to love.

103

Fromm. The Sane Society at pp. 243-44.

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And, so Freud, the idealist, says that “Eros and Ananke were the parents of human culture, two great powers cooperating together to facilitate mastery and an increase in individuals sharing life in common – a common bond of love.” 104 But Freud, the realist, paraphrasing Hobbes, tempers our expectations of a harmonious compact because “[c]ivilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through the primary hostility of men to each other . . .; [therefore] necessity alone, the advantages of common work, would not hold them together. The natural instinct of aggressiveness in man, the hostility of each one against all, and all against each one, opposes civilization. Culture has to call up every possible reinforcement in order to erect barriers against the aggressive instincts of men.” 105 The dominant accent here are egoism and a fatalistic determinism and the reinforcements, of course, are the great institutions of our culture, including the rule of law and the mutual obligations that bind us together.

Elaborated later by Herbert Marcuse, work is not irreconcilable with pleasure when it is the expression of free choice. “However, if ‘free choice’ means more than a selection between jobs with pre-determined functions, it is only a rare privilege to the few.” 106 Heavily influenced by Marx and the critique of capitalism, Marcuse offers the following observation of the market exchange: “The work that created and enlarged the material basis of civilization was chiefly labor, alienated labor, painful and miserable – and still is. The performance of such work hardly gratifies

104

Id, a 69. Ananke being the Greek god of necessity.

Id. at 86, 102 106 Herbert Marcuse. Eros and Civilization (1955).

105

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individual needs and inclinations. It is imposed upon man by brute necessity and brute force.” 107 Fromm too decries employment in the market, specifically pointing to industrialism as the chief culprit of alienation and quoting Marx directly: “In handicrafts and manufacture, the workman makes use of the tool; in the factory the machine makes use of him.” 108 At the same time, Fromm extolls the potential of work as humankind’s “liberator from nature, his creator as social and independent being. In the process of work, that is, the molding and changing of nature outside of himself, man molds and changes himself.” 109 However, for Marx, Fromm and Marcuse, natural human work has been expropriated from the worker and objectified, much the same as how when a woman is objectified she is alienated from her personhood. The laborer now the objecttool has been reduced to the status of a wage slave (the woman, a sex slave). As long as work remains alienated, a commodity, it can never be an expression of free choice which, in psychanalytic terms, is a prerequisite for mental health. The criticism here is against capitalism itself, or at least industrial capitalism. The industrial division of labor, enabled by machines, is dehumanizing and offers no social value. 110

107

Id. at 85 (emphasis in the original).

Erich Fromm. Marx’s Concept of Man (1961) 109 Erich Fromm, The Sane Society (1955) pp. 177-78 (emphasis in the original) 110 It required an average of 625 man-hours to build a car in 1911. By 1929 the time had been reduced to 92 man-hours. In 2020, it takes about 17-18 hours. The Marxist critique is unavailing as it does to consider the enormous social advancement wrought by the productivity of better machines operated by fewer workers.

108

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This interpretation means that in an industrialized society, where most work is commoditized, it can only be miserable undertaking. Twentieth century psychoanalysis, influenced

by Hobbes and Freud and later by Marx are profoundly deterministic in this view and have wholly rejected rationalism as the guiding forces of human nature, reserving free will as an ideal. Human behavior, being subject to unfathomable, unconscious, uncontrollable instincts is essentially irrational, motivated by impulses and desires that needed to be checked by the culture or havoc and destruction would ensue. Free will which led only to wanton and destructive behavior, was abandoned, if it ever had existed at all, as a guiding principle. In whatever form it takes and continues to take – genetics, for example, - determinism holds a powerful hold on the culture. 111 In the end, however, determinism, whatever its source is a socially constructed doctrine, the purpose of which is to impose social obedience and restrict human choice.

“Obedience in the patriarchal world of the biblical and later Jewish tradition is obedience to the father figure who represents reason, conscience and law, moral and spiritual principles. The highest authority in the biblical system is God, who is the lawgiver and who represents conscience.”

112 Obedience to God supersedes obedience to man. Thus, in the Talmud, a worker can quit his job “even in the middle

111

Virtually all reported linkages of complex human traits to genes are based on flimsy evidence – the feel good gene, the confidence gene, the race discrimination gene, the thrill-seeking gene, the adulterous gene, the aggressive gene, the leadership gene, the follower gene, the selfish gene, the altruism gene, to name but a few. Determinism reductio ad absurdum.

112 Erich Fromm. You Shall Be As Gods (1966), p, 59

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of the day.” 113 The worker’s right to walk off the job without warning is based on the general principle of man’s unique obedience to God – he literally works for God and not man.

Work, therefore, is expressed as a devotional act.

The relentless march of science eventually produced evidence that the Hebrew Scriptures were not the unerring word of God. The old tradition that every individual was animated by the purposes of a providential God still held great power. But the new science of the sixtieth and seventieth centuries revealed that even if Creation might have been launched by a God of some kind, it was not sustained by constant divine intervention. The mechanistic laws of nature drove the universe forward, toward greater humanistic ends. Labor could be viewed as a natural consequence of choice and human agency, in other words as materialistic rather than spiritual.

Eventually, guilds formed throughout Europe during the Middle Ages. Guilds were groups of individuals with common occupational or commercial goals. The term guild probably derives from the Anglo-Saxon root geld which meant “to pay, contribute.” The noun form of geld meant an association of persons contributing money for some common purpose. The root also meant “to sacrifice, worship.” The dual definitions probably reflected guilds’ origins as both secular and religious organizations.

Craft guilds were organized along lines of particular trades.

Members of these guilds typically owned and operated small businesses or family workshops. Craft guilds operated in many sectors of the economy, including bakers, brewers, and

113

Id at p. 60.

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butchers. 114 The early Christian craftsmen found their spiritual homes in monasteries. The monastic experience shaped attitudes toward work as early Church doctrine generally viewed free time and leisure as temptations for sin.

Severe discipline was expected in the workshop.

Guilds formed local monopolies to manage the labor pool, protect trade secrets, and to set wages and prices. To attain their collective goals, guild members had to cooperate. If some members slacked off, all would suffer. Guilds that wished to lower the costs of labor had to get all masters to reduce wages. Guilds that wished to raise the prices of products had to get all members to restrict output. Guilds that wished to develop respected reputations had to get all members to sell superior merchandise. To convince members to cooperate and advance their common interests, 114

See Gary Richardson, Medieval Guilds, EH.net https://eh.net/encyclopedia/medieval-guilds/

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guilds formed stable, self-enforcing associations that possessed structures for making and implementing collective decisions. Slackers and recalcitrants were punished.

In addition to protecting local markets, the guilds were the primary vehicle for teaching and certifying occupational skills through a three-tiered hierarchy of masters, journeymen and apprentices. The length of the apprenticeship contract could last for eight years. The guild was based on the paternal hierarchy of the family and the master was a surrogate father. However, “[t]he master was enjoined by a religious oath that no father had ever to swear in words, that of improving the skills of his charges.” 115 In return, the apprentice was bound by both contract and solemn oath to keep the secrets of his master – the “mysteries” of the trade. “These legal and religious bonds brought emotional rewards that the biological bonds could not furnish: they guaranteed the good apprentice that he could carry emblems and flags of the guild during civic parades and that he could enjoy a privileged place at banquets.” 116 The guilds’ religious oaths established a reciprocal devotion between surrogate father and son, often stronger than simple filial obedience. And the contract provided the apprentice with a legal remedy should he be beaten or abused by the master, whereas the beatings he endured from his father were borne of patriarchal privilege.

117

Some might say that church and state emerged as separate domains with the Peace of Westphalia, which concluded the 115

Richard Sennett. The Craftsman (2008), p, 63.

Id. 117 Guilds were the exclusively province of men.

116

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Thirty Years’ War in 1648. The nation state and the global commercial market swept many of the ancient guilds aside in favor of larger monopolies and merchant banking, often capitalized, operated and protected by the popes and monarchs. But in the reforming impulse of the Protestants, particularly the Calvinists, work remained an essentially devotional act.

For the Reformation Protestant whose zealousness matched the Hasidic tradition, the function of humankind on earth was no mystery, the chief aim being the glorification of God. “This could be done with every human action, and in any phase of life. He glorified God by worshiping in church, or by making a first-rate pair of shoes, or by performing services in such a fashion that he made his employer and his associates and those around him happier.” 118 This relentless focus was first and foremost the result of the profound anxiety produced by the immutable tenet of predestiny, which only God knows whether a soul is to be saved or dammed after death. Thus, the Protestant was in constant need to earn his moral standing before God. In this, “the Protestant sought to offer proof of his worthiness in the sight of God by disciplining himself, but unlike the Catholic penitent in a monastery, he would show he was worthy through work . . . relentless hard work.” 119 The Reformation profoundly affected the view of work, dignifying even the most mundane professions as adding to the common good and thus blessed by God, as much as any sacred calling. “Work for the saints was the warrant and source of all wealth: God gave the use of the world to the industrious and the rational; title to property came 118 119

Adolf A. Berle. The American Economic Republic (1963), p. 190.

Richard Sennett. The Corrosion of Character (1998) p. 103.

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principally from work; the fruits of labor belonged to the worker; men and women had only the right to what they could actually use. Puritans were equal before God, each driven by a calling to improve their own lot, thereby contributing to the common good.” 120 However, to the Puritan’s great relief, to serve the Lord was not inconsistent with earthly reward. That the honest servant should be well paid and be able to move up in status through hard work, thrift and delayed gratification was entirely consistent with the natural order of things. The German sociologist, Max Weber famously postulated that the religious underpinnings of the Protestant ethic lay at the foundation of capitalism and mass production. 121 Indeed, as laissez faire capitalism became the dominant ideology of Gilded Age America, many a Protestant clergyman pronounced the accumulation of great wealth as God’s will. While I may ask the reader to wait for an extended discussion of work and ideology, I will simply say now that according to the Gospel of Wealth “the best legislation in the industrial and commercial sphere of human activity has long since been enacted by the Supreme Lawgiver; and every interposition by human government is both impertinent and harmful.” 122 Laissez faire economics and social Darwinism were part and parcel of religious determinism that found expression from pulpits throughout the United States. Like businessmen, the clergy “accepted inequalities among men as inevitable and desirable and 120

Innes, S. Creating the Commonwealth (1995).

Weber, M. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

Penguin Edition (2002).

122 Sidney Fine. Laissez Faire and the General Welfare State (1956) at p. 124 quoting Harris “Capital and Labor,” Christian Thought, 3rd Ser. (1885) pp. 27-30 121

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maintained that those who had risen to the top were men of ability whereas those who had failed had only themselves to blame.� 123 As noted by Smith in Hobbesian fashion: “Whenever there is great property, there is great inequality . . . The affluence of the rich excites the indignation of the poor, who are both driven by want, and prompted by envy, to invade his possessions. It is only under the shelter of the civil magistrate that the owner of valuable property, which is acquired by labor for many years, or perhaps of many successive generations, can sleep a single night in security.

124 Smith goes on to say that property will always lead to the subordination of the individual by the civil government and the rule of law. In Hobbesian terms, the freedom to kill one another is given up to the chief magistrate in favor of security and all must follow the magistrate’s orders or descend into anarchy. The person with property has the most to lose so he is the most fervent believer in the rule of law. Eventually, the founders of the new American republic who digested Hobbes and Smith formed a government that aimed to act as an honest broker among competing fractions and a propertied class that would be he buffer between the rapaciousness of the landed aristocracy and the barbarism of the mob.

The largest pyramid, built for the Pharaoh Khufu around 2530 B.C. and intended to last an eternity, was until early in the twentieth century the biggest building on the planet. To raise it, laborers moved into position six and a half million tons of stone - some in blocks as large as nine tons - with nothing but wood and rope. The question of who labored to 123 124

Id. at 118.

Adam Smith. The Wealth of Nations, p. 901-902.

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build them, and why, has long been part of their fascination.

Rooted firmly in the popular imagination is the idea that the pyramids were built by slaves serving an all-powerful pharaoh. Generations of scholars have calculated how many laborers would have been needed to quarry, transport, and position the stones of the great pyramids. Estimates have ranged widely - from the 100,000 cited by Herodotus, who wrote in the fifth century B.C, to about 20,000 thousand posited by recent assessments that allow for decades of construction time. Many Egyptologists subscribe to the hypothesis that, in addition to a mass of common laborers, the pyramids were also built by a rotating labor force of craftsman and artisans, in a modular, team-based kind of organization. 125 The idea of a universal free labor ethos went as far back as the Enlightenment when English philosophers such as John Locke imagined new possibilities for human liberty, freedom and happiness. Locke, a Puritan, closely followed Genesis in developing would be called the labor theory of property. To Locke, “God, when he gave the world in common to all mankind, commanded man also to labor, to improve it for the benefit of life, and therein lay out something upon it that was his own, his labor.” 126 The right to ownership was derived whenever a person “mixed” his labor with property, thereby removing it from its natural state where it resided in common. To Locke, labor conveyed ownership of property and liberty itself rested on the individual’s control over the fruits of his own labor, Locke 125

Shaw, J. Who Built the Pyramids Harvard Magazine (2003) https://harvardmagazine.com/2003/07/who-built-the-pyramids-html 126

Locke, J. The Second Treatise of Government (2010) Guttenberg Project https://www.gutenberg.org/files/7370/7370-h/7370-h.htm

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opposed slavery, which he defined as the state in which an individual no longer controlled his labor, as a violation of natural law but found no fault in indentured servitude, since the servant gave up his freedom only until such time as his debt was repaid to his master.

Locke’s labor value of property formed the bedrock of an emerging free exchange economy and once codified by English common law, became the foundation of a free market economy based on natural law in the United States.

No less than Edward Coke, in 1603, ruled against a royal prerogative to grant a monopoly patent in Darcy v. Allen.

Darcy, a groom in the Queen’s privy chamber was granted a twenty-one year monopoly patent over the manufacture, import and sales of playing cards through all England. Allen, a London merchant, infringed the patent and suit was brought.

Allen enjoyed considerable support from the merchant class of London, who chaffed under the abuses of the royal monopoly system. But Allen’s lawyer did not argue that his client’s rights outweighed that of the sovereign for it was God’s law that controlled the case. “The Ordinance of God is, that every man should live by labor, and that he who will not labor, let him not eat,” argued Allen’s counsel. As it followed, “a restraint of a man’s trade is against God’s law.

Now, therefore, Letters Patent against the laws of God are void.” It is thought that the biblical justification of free labor greatly influenced Lord Coke as he would have been otherwise be reluctant to overrule the Queen’s law. But Coke, being a contemporary jurist, grounded his holding on natural law finding that the monopoly infringed on Allen’s “freedom and liberty to engage in a lawful trade of his choice.”

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According to Locke, each person plainly has “a property in his own person,” including the “labor of his body, and the work in his own hands.” He continues to explain the free exchange of labor when “a freeman makes himself a servant to another by selling him, for a certain time, the service he undertakes to do in exchange for wages he is to receive.”

When the exchange is made, for a period of time, the labor no longer belongs to the seller and the result of the labor belongs to the master. “Thus,” says Locke “the turfs my servant has cut, I have a right to them and it is my property without the assignment or consent of anybody. The [servant’s] labor has fixed my property in them.

A core feature of American republican ideology rests on Locke’s views on labor and property. To Madison, in its larger and more just meaning, property embraced everything to which a person may attach a value and have a right, including labor. 127 For Jefferson, “the earth is given as a common stock for man to labor and live on.” 128 Lincoln repeatedly professed the same creed. “Property is the fruit of labor” as such, “labor is prior to, and independent of, capital.” 129 Walt Whitman, a great admirer of Lincoln and the Union, added his voice to the struggle, uncovering eternal meanings in work and the working person, giving lyrical expression to Locke’s dictum that human labor, as a part of nature, has

127

Madison, J. On Property (1792) reprinted by Heritage Foundation https://thf_media.s3.amazonaws.com/CPP/FP_PS02w.pdf

128

Jefferson Papers Extract from Thomas Jefferson to James Madison (1785) http://tjrs.monticello.org/letter/73 129

Lincoln on Democracy. Cuomo, M. & Holzer, H. ed. (1990) 51.

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made human culture, and Lincoln’s belief that labor predated property and all other social institutions.

Male and Female! ....

American Masses! ....

This is the poem of occupations; In the labor of engines and trades, and the labor of the fields, I find the developments, And the eternal meanings.

Workmen and Workwomen! . . . . Souls of men and women! It is not you I call unseen, unheard, Untouchable and untouching; ....

We thought our Union grand, and our Construction grand; I do not say they are not grand and good, for they are; I am this day just as much in love with hem as you; Then I am in love with you, and with all my fellows upon the earth.

We consider bibles and religion divine – I do not say they are not divine; I say they have grown out of you, and may grow out of you still; 112 | P a g e

It is not they who give life – it is you who give life; Leaves are not more shed from the trees, or trees from the earth, than they are shed out of you. 130

In all of this, wage work was free only to the extent that it was done temporarily on the road to autonomous, selfemployment. Prior to the Civil War, as the United States was being torn apart by conflicting views of labor and property, Abraham Lincoln expressed the free labor view succinctly: “The prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land, for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to 130

Leaves of Grass To Workingmen 180-187. The idea that property, as a natural right, predates government has been propounded by socalled evolutionary economists from von Mises to Hayek, from Singer to Wilson. If effect, they argue that trade predates human history; that is, markets predate government by thousands of years. Thus, government has no legitimate right to regulate markets beyond basic police protections.

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help him – a just and generous, and prosperous system which opens the way to all – gives hope to all, and energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all.” 131

America’s early colonial experience seemed to bear out Locke’s imperative. Indentured servitude was impractical and not easily enforceable, as servants merely ran off, much as Benjamin Franklin did when he violated his indenture in Massachusetts to become an apprentice in the printing trade in Pennsylvania. 132 And with other Enlightenment ideas, Locke’s labor theory of property profoundly influenced republican thought. So close was the Declaration of 131

Lincoln on Democracy 151 The young Franklin was indentured to a stepbrother who, perhaps out of fondness for the lad, didn’t pursue him across state lines, which would also have been inconvenient.

132

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Independence to Locke’s writings in form and in substance that Jefferson was accused of copying Locke’s Second Treatise of Government which was published in 1690. In sum, Locke defined property as more than tangible objects, but also “as property that men have in their persons as well as goods.” Adopting this concept of self-ownership, the Declaration of Independence defines the fundamental property right as ownership in oneself and combines it with the other inalienable rights to secure life and liberty and to pursue happiness. 133 With this firmly entrenched in republican ideology, Jefferson thought that only the nation’s yeoman farmers could possess the virtue to fulfill the obligations of citizenship because their independence could not be bribed, bought or controlled. 134

133

Neither the Declaration nor the U.S. Constitution defines “property” but it is clear that the survival of the new republic depended on private property and free labor, at least in the North.

The chief purpose of government was to protect property in all its manifestations, another Lockean principle. Therefore, common ownership and redistribution was anathema, a form of tyranny.

134 Smith too paraphrased Locke when he wrote in The Wealth of Nations “the property which every man has in his own labor, as it is the original foundation of all property . . . is the most sacred and inviolable” and for laborer “property lies in the strength and dexterity of his hands.’

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Eventually, however, as trade increased with better transportation and capital became more concentrated, and a market for production evolved with and an ownership class, republicans began to think that virtue could be fostered in the workshop among craftsmen, artisan and mechanics who owned the means of production and were beholden to no boss, at least not permanently. The journeymen and apprentices who worked for wages for artisan masters did only temporarily until they acquired the skills and capital to start their own shops.

Jefferson and other republicans no doubt had in mind William Blake’s “dark Satanic Mills� of London, Hamburg and other European cities in their distrust of centralized manufacturing, as early industrialism seemed bent on destroying nature and human relationships under its relentless iron heel. 135 But in 1810, only about 75,000 135

industrial mills were appearing all over England and with it the destruction of nature and human relationships when William Blake wrote is poem Jerusalem in 1804.

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Americans worked in factories. However, by 1835, Alexis De Tocqueville, citing, but not attributing, directly to Smith’s depiction of the division of labor in The Wealth of Nations, observed: When a workman is unceasingly and exclusively engaged in the fabrication of one thing, he ultimately does his work with singular dexterity; but at the same time he loses the general faculty of applying his mind to the direction of the work. He every day becomes more adroit and less industrious; so that it may be said of him, that in proportion as the workman improves the man is degraded. What can be expected of a man who has spent twenty years of his life in making heads for pins? And to what can that mighty human intelligence, which has so often stirred the world, be applied in him, except it be to investigate the best method of making pins’ heads? When a workman has spent a considerable portion of his existence in this manner, his thoughts are forever set upon the object of his daily toil; his body has contracted certain fixed habits, which it can never shake off: in a word, he no longer belongs to himself, but to the calling which he has chosen. It is in vain that laws and manners have been at the pains to level all barriers round such a man, and to open to him on every side a thousand different paths to fortune; a theory of manufactures more powerful than manners and laws binds him to a craft, and frequently to a spot, which he cannot leave: it assigns to him a certain place in society, beyond which he cannot go: in the midst of universal movement it has rendered him stationary.

In proportion as the principle of the division of labor is more extensively applied, the workman becomes weaker, more

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narrow-minded, and more dependent. The art advances, the artisan recedes. 136 As Smith had concluded, Jefferson feared, and DeTocqueville observed, the common wage laborer was dependent on his master for subsistence. This dependency and limited range of choice worsened when the Irish famine flooded American cities with impoverished immigrants in 1846. With indentured servitude on the wane, and with it the legal and moral obligation of the master to provide at least a minimal amount of care for his servant, the average period of employment for a wageworker was reduced to a week, or even a day or an hour, thus making wage labor more sensitive and flexible to the fluctuations of the market. If any single factor dominated the lives of these workers, it was insecurity.

In contrast to Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton had advocated for an industrial state and viewed the factory system as an inevitable byproduct of property and progress. In view of republican opposition, however, Hamilton shrewdly reconciled factory work with liberty and property by advocating a paternalistic system reserved for women, children and servants who had been disenfranchised from the U.S. Constitution. In his report on establishing an American manufacturing sector submitted to the first Congress, Hamilton noted that women and children would make ideal factory workers and that “the husbandman himself would experience a new source of profit and support, from the 136

Democracy in America (1835). In Wealth of Nations, Smith described the division of labor in a pin factory. While extolling the efficiencies of having each worker perform a discrete task, he conceded that the repetitive and monotonous work degraded the worker making him “dim witted” “dull” and “ignorant.”

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increased industry of his wife and daughters, invited and stimulated by the demands of neighboring manufactories.”

However, the concentration of capital required by the factory system, together with the labor-saving machines that sent unskilled farm hands and immigrants to manufacturing centers in search of employment, undermined republican autonomy. De Tocqueville noted the appearance of a harsh “manufacturing aristocracy” in America “like the great aristocratic societies of former ages, some men who are very opulent, and a multitude who are wretchedly poor.” “The manufacturing aristocracy,” he wrote, “first impoverishes and debases the men who serve it, and then abandons them to be supported by the charity of the public.” This new force was “one of the harshest which ever existed in the world’ and the lower wages fell “the more easily [laborers] were oppressed: they can never escape from this fatal circle of cause and consequence.” Describing the freedom of the common laborer, DeTocqueville bleakly wrote: “The workmen must work day by day or they die, for their property is in their hands.” He also described the wide chasm between capital and free labor, observing that the master and servant “meet on the factory floor, but know not each other elsewhere; and whilst they come into contact in one point, they stand very wide apart on all others. The manufacturer asks nothing of the workman but his labor; the workman expects nothing from him but his wages. The one contracts no obligation to protect, nor the other to defend; and they are not permanently connected either by habit or duty.”

The capitalist wage system expropriated labor on a scale so great that it dwarfed the southern plantation slave system.

The master owned his salves as property and therefore required a return on his investment. This required the provision of food, clothing and shelter to at least allow for the continued labor of the slave. When the slave trade was 119 | P a g e

abolished, the master had to cultivate generations of slaves to prosper. In contrast, the wage bargain in the north required no investment in the laborer, only a subsistence wage. When the laborer became too old, ill or injured to work, he was replaced by another hand, most likely at a cheaper price. Surplus profit was invested in machinery which greatly increased labor’s output without the need to raise wages. The constitutional structure protected both the wage and slave systems. The U.S. Constitution did not define property, leaving that to the states to define under common law, although the founders made clear that “Government is instituted to protect property of every sort.”

It was also clear that the drafters viewed property in Lockean terms. During the ratification debates, James Madison paraphrased Locke, arguing that the term “property” embraced “everything to which man may attach value and have a right, including the labor that acquires daily subsistence.” Thus, the ownership of one’s labor, selfownership and the freedom to exchange that labor in the market is a basic human right under the law. Inimical to this idea would be communism and other collectivist doctrines which held property in common, including labor. The ownership of slaves, as property, was equally protected.

As observed by Richard Hofstadter in The American Political Tradition, the founders expressly linked liberty to property. “They wanted freedom from fiscal uncertainty and irregularities in the currency, from trade wars among the states, from economic discrimination by more powerful foreign governments, from attacks on the creditor class or on property from popular insurrection. They aimed to create a government that would act as an honest broker among a variety of propertied enemies and preventing anyone of them from becoming too powerful.” According to Hofstadter, the founders probably would have accepted the Declaration’s dictum that “all men were created equal” but only as a legal, 120 | P a g e

not a social or political, proposition. Even Jefferson believed in the existence of a “natural aristocracy” based on private property, but, as Hofstadter has noted, “dread of the propertyless masses” was all but universal among the men who founded the national government. What encouraged them, however, was the broad dispersion of land and the class of independent artisans and craftsmen, Small landowners and owners of their own tools and labor had a stake in the government and even though merchants, bankers and large landowners would dominate the key institutions within the government, small property owners would have an independent and far from negligible voice. Thus, property ownership became the basis of suffrage; consent of “the people” meant property owners, small and large.

Accordingly, the survival of the new Republic was based on the wide dispersion of property and the independent labor of artisans and craftsman, enabled by a government with its chief purpose to protect property rights. The rights derived from Nature’s law, the right to life, liberty and property would be preserved, as self-ownership and independent labor would give free reign to human ingenuity and ambition.

It is known that Marx imbibed deeply in Hobbes and Smith, and perhaps Jefferson, and he too idolized the small fabricator, craftsman and artisan and scorned the factory system dominated by machines and an ownership class. "In handicrafts and manufacture, the workman makes use of a tool; in the factory the machine makes use of him. There the movements of the instrument of labor proceed from him; here it is the movement of the machines that he must follow.

In manufacture, the workmen are parts of a living mechanism; in the factory we have a lifeless mechanism,

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independent of the workman, who becomes its mere living appendage." 137 Here the reader may do well to contemplate Vincent van Gogh’s depiction of labor and the workman in Loom with Weaver, painted in 1884. Van Gogh, the son of a Dutch Reformed pastor, felt a profound kinship with workers, peasants and weavers. 138 From 1883 to 1885, he lived and worked in Nuenen, southern Belgium in the Provence of Brabant. Some 440 weavers were employed in Nuenen when van Gogh lived there. He became fascinated by these artisans and during 1883 and 1884 he spent time drawing and painting hand weavers. The weaver depicted in this painting is dignified and is religious in character, fully absorbed in his task, reflecting, no doubt, a parallel intensity van Gogh had in his own work. But the other main subject of the painting is the fantastic machine brought to life in spools, woven cloth and a hanging tassel. In this great painting, there is no alienation in the weaver’s work, there is no oppression by the machine. There is an unmistakable spiritual nature to the work that the weaver is performing and here we can clearly see the idealized artisan at work where man and machine are unified in a living mechanism, as the

137

Marx, K. Das Kapital. Gateway Edition (1965) pp. 146-47. For Marx the process of alienation is expressed in the division of labor. Work is for him a biological imperative, the active relatedness of man to nature, the creation of culture. Of this, there is no disagreement. But as private property and the division of labor develop, labor loses its character of being an expression of man's nature; labor and its products assume an existence separate from man, his will and his planning. Thus, alienated labor, which according to this thesis is most work performed in the market, is inhuman.

138 The painting hangs in the Kröller-Müller Museum in The Netherlands.

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movements of the instrument of labor proceed from weaver, not the other way around.

There is no ulterior motive in work other than the product being made and the processes of its creation. Work is both a means and an end. The worker controls the process, as if a child at play, and the craftsman’ livelihood determines and infuses his entire mode of living. In all of this, the craftsman, as an ideal, is one with his work which is the essence of selfownership and self-governance. 139 Such was the ideal. Yet, even as an idealized myth was (and still is) being perpetuated about the craftsman and artisan, primarily for polemical reasons, the reality of this so-called golden era was much different, for as we know, the craftsman and artisan were not immune from the forces and demands of the market

139

C. Wright Mills. White Collar (1951). For the craftsman, “[t]here is no split of work and play, or work and culture.� at 220.

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economy. They may have been practicing soul-craft but they still had to make a living.

Moreover, in their effort to construct a singular American people, the republicans attached new meaning to “whiteness,� conflating it with reason, with freedom, with citizenship. Thousands of Blacks and Native peoples fought for this revolutionary ideal but found themselves segregated from the new polity. Manifests of slave ships identify some of their captives as artisans, such as weavers, woodcarvers, and metalworkers, and records of sale indicate a higher monetary value for these skilled individuals. The value of the skilled slave, those who arrived with skills in traditional African crafts as well as those who were trained during captivity, is well documented in both slave narratives and in advertisements for the return of runaways. 140 Slaves were apprenticed to cabinetmakers, silversmiths, goldsmiths, printers, and engravers. In some cases these skills created benefit for the slaves; some were able to purchase their freedom, and others fled, assured of their ability to earn a living. Such apprenticeships, to white artisans as well as free Blacks, continued well into the nineteenth century. In the early 1800s free Black artisans and slave apprentices figured prominently in the production of home furnishings until white protectionist legislation in some states restricted both the number of slave apprentices as well as the number of businesses owned by free Blacks.

By 1850 these restrictions, coupled with further restrictions on freeing slaves and an increase in industrial development,

140

Trotter, J.W. Workers on Arrival: Black labor in the Making of America (2019).

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led to a decline in the numbers of Black artisans, both enslaved and free. 141 Before the Civil War, the vast majority of skilled craftsmen lived in the countryside, including the south, both Black and white. Limited by transportation, they were unable to compete outside their local market. By the same token, wage and price fixing regulated the competition. But better transportation through the development of highways, canals, bridges and railroads also meant competition from urban artisans and factories that were able to produce goods at lower cost and in greater abundance due to the economies of scale and machinery that the smaller shops lacked. While many craftsmen survived in the face of factory production and the better transport of manufactured products, the factory system re-defined work, breaking it down into a routine division of labor and essentially de-skilling the crafts. 142 In this more or less cut-throat environment, journeymen and apprentices found some masters kind, others cruel, some workshops cordial, others unpleasant. While apprentices had common law or contractual legal remedies against abusive or exploitive masters, valuable time was lost on the way of earning a livelihood. With the increasing competition from better capitalized shops and factories, “[t]he boss wanted to keep the apprentice not to teach him a trade but to exploit his labor.” 143 And soon the mass publication of trade journals democratized the craftsman’s secrets, his mysteries. “The craft books stripped away the magic, and if a youth could 141

Id, Wages of Independence: Capitalism in the Early American Republic, Gilge, P. ed. (1997).

143 Rorabaugh, W.J. The Craft Apprentice (1986) p. 139.

142

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read, he could discover the processes of his craft on the sterile printed page. The master ceased to be a magician and became one of a thousand followers of a routine.” 144 As the sons of artisan’s began to abandon the crafts of their fathers, the artisanal system unraveled. Eventually, the ageold crafts became overwhelmed by the system of cash wages. The cash system weakened the masters (and father’s) moral authority and transformed the master-pupil relationship into an employer-employee relationship and soon the skilled craftsman and artisans slipped into lower skilled wage labor. In 1810, well over ninety percent of the adult population held agricultural and supporting trade jobs.

By 1850, forty percent of working adults were working for wages and living in an industrial community. By 1870, the majority of adult Americans worked for a wage and “it was perfectly evident that most workers would remain workers all their lives, and indeed that the economic system required them to do so. “ 145 Indeed, John C. Calhoun, the senator from South Carolina, presidential candidate and political theorist, who Hofstadter called the "Marx of the Master Class,” read this same history to justify American slavery. 146 Every great civilization was based on a permanent laboring class, including slaves. Thus, he reasoned that “[i]f there must always be a submerged and exploited class at the base of society, and if the Sothern salves, as such a class, were better off than Northern free workers, and if slavery was the safest and most durable base on which to found political institutions, then there seems to 144

Id. at 36 Hobsbawm, E. The Age of Capital (1955) p. 218.

146 Hofstadter, R. The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (1948) 145

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be no reason why all workers, white and black, industrial or agrarian, should not be slaves.� The case for slavery as a humane institution was vigorously put forward by George Fitzhugh as well. Arguing that southern slaves were better off than northern wage workers because “free labor makes laborers slaves, without the rights, privileges, or advantages of domestic slaves, and capitalists their masters, with all the advantages, and none of the burdens and obligations of ordinary owners of slaves.� 147

Slaveholders essentially made the case that the natural state of all or most manual labor, which accounted for most of the work performed at the time, was slavery. But the slave master lived in a perpetual state of insecurity, as the sheer number of slaves outnumbered the masters. The masters, a minority class, did whatever they could to be secure.

Through beatings and flogging, amputations and beheadings, they terrorized their slaves. Some masters allowed slaves to cultivate their own crops to sell in the local economy. Some legally emancipated favored slaves. Others 147

Fitzhugh, G. Cannibals All! Edited by C. Vann Woodward (1960)

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wantonly raped them. However, most masters lived in fear of slave insurrection and went to bed wondering whether their throats would be cut in the night. The fear of the Black man carried over to the North after the Civil War as many emancipated slaves sought jobs in the market economy.

Irish immigrants and others resented the competition. In the Middle of the war, the predominantly Irish working class in New York City rioted against the military draft, lynching Black citizens, burning Black neighborhoods and even burning a Black orphanage to the ground. The competition over jobs after the war, fueled racial hatred continues to this day.

To abolitionists, once the slave was free, he or she could sell their labor, even back to a former master. It was this voluntary exchange of labor for compensation which destroyed the badge of servitude. Labor that was offered and sold as a market commodity was viewed as the very definitions of freedom. The Union victory in the Civil War ended slavery but it did not settle the question of freedom and opportunity. However, faced with an emerging industrial economy increasingly at odds with republican ideals, wage labor, as a voluntary exchange, was elevated as superior to compelled servitude. Freedom of contract was, the employment contract, was now a political and civil right and exalted with private property as being the twin pillars of personhood and citizenship.

However, at least among white Americans, the proliferation of wage work at the expense of the craft traditions of individualism and autonomous work provoked deep anxiety.

148 However, industrialism seemed to be the natural 148

In 1883, Henry George wrote in Social Problems that factories were “rendering the workman dependent; depriving him of skills and

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consequence of private property and appeared to reflect the notion of evolution from simple to more complex organisms in nature, from the factious individualism of Hobbes to a civilized interdependence built on cooperation, an evolution from simple tools to complex machines. As such, industrialism was viewed as a civilizing force for humankind.

By 1840, the factories in Lowell, Massachusetts employed more than 8,000 textile workers, all white, commonly known as factory girls. These "operatives" so-called because they operated the looms and other machinery were primarily women and children from farms whose parents monetized their labor. Many of the young women who came to work at the textile factories were housed in supervised dormitories or boardinghouses and were provided with educational and cultural opportunities.

The owners believed that by providing safety in the workplace, preventing sexual advances by male supervisors, comfortable living conditions, and a socially positive living and working environment he could ensure a steady supply of labor.

In a paper entitled The Factory System as an Element of Civilization delivered Carroll D. Wright, chief of the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics on Labor, to the Social Science Association in 1882, the factory was portrayed as a force for “better morals, better sanitary conditions, better health and better wages.” He concluded his paper with a call to the “Captains of Industry” to “carry the responsibility entrusted to them” for the “rich and powerful manufacturer

opportunities to acquire it; lessoning his control over his own condition and is hope of improving it: cramping his mind, and in many cases distorting and enervating his body.”

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is something more than a producer, he is the instrument of God for the rebuilding of the race.” 149

However, most of these captains of industry proved to be as brutal as the captain on the battlefield. The Lowell factory owners cut wages, fired the girls and hired Irish immigrants as replacements. After the Civil War, with millions of workers fighting over jobs that paid starvation wages, the United States witnesses its first widespread experience with class warfare and communist agitation largely in response to a severe economic depression and the hostility of state and federal governments to provide even temporary relief.

A near national strike in 1877 started by the nation’s railroad workers in response to pay cuts to 75 cents per day, engulphed the industrial cities of the northeast and mid-west, 149

Sarno, J. Perils of Prosperity 92009) pp. 139-40. Even Jefferson, the republican ideologue believed in a “natural aristocracy” to which he, himself, belonged.

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including the great rail hubs of New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Pittsburg and Chicago. First met with private railroad militias and detectives, followed by the state national guards and eventually by the United States Army, workers walked off their jobs and protested, impaired transportation (except for the U.S. mail) and occupied company facilities. Civil resistance lead to arrests, beatings and killings or workers and, in many cases, to women and children. An unbridled and sensationalist press fanned the flames of class warfare as hundreds of labor leaders, labelled communists, were denied due process of law, tried in military-type tribunals and hanged. “Scores of commentators agreed that communists were everywhere – for to go on strike was to be a communist.� 150 The economic depression caused mass social dislocation in the United States, as tens of thousands of men and, in some cases women, many veterans of the Civil War, travelled the country by foot and rail looking for work, odd jobs and handouts. Labelled as tramps, these jobless, wandering people posed a menace to conventional society and were demonized as criminals, murderers and rapists. 151 State and local municipalities passed anti-vagrancy laws, in effect, criminalizing unemployment.

150 151

Bellesiles, M. 1877 (2010) at p. 178.

Id. at 115-127.

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At the same time, a wave of terror was unleashed in the former confederate states, as Black citizens were lynched, decapitated, impaled and skinned and burned alive. Black rural workers were reduced to the peonage of sharecropping.

Together with the unemployed and those industrial workers who worked for starvation wages, a whole class of Americans were viewed as sub-human by industrialists, academics and clergy alike. Deeply racist attitudes informed the consensus view that helping workers with minimum wage laws and health and safety rules was against nature and God’s law. As the most famous and well-paid reverend Henry Ward Beecher intoned: “The general truth will stand, that no man in this land suffers from poverty unless it be more than his fault – unless it be a sin.” 152 Unemployment and poverty were the fault of the individual, his failing, his sin. Government had no role supporting 152

Id. at 127.

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failures as it would only perpetuate pauperism. The poor were even blamed for their moral failures in breeding disease. 153 As William Graham Sumner, America’s leading public intellectual and thought leader explained to a Congressional Committee: “There are no rights. The world owes nobody a living. It is better for the poor and destitute to die than to be supported by government.” 154 As for women, the Supreme Court of the United States held that “a woman had no legal existence separate from her husband” and could not hold a job without the permission of her husband. Her “permanent destiny,” the court declared, was “to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother.

This was the law of the Creator.” 155 The court, of course, was living a Victorian fantasy, as women and children longed worked in America’s factories, often replacing what was perceived as lazy and shiftless men who demanded hire pay for less work, particularly at the looms in the textile factory.

By the mid-19th century, England was in the grip of the Industrial Revolution and was the world’s leading manufacturer. Factories sprang up all over the Midlands and the northern counties, and the mass production of goods meant long hours of intense labor and low wages for the workforce. Industry was beginning to dominate working people’s lives, and the consequent reduction in the quality of life for these workers led to illness, disease and desperation.

The alternatives for the poor were crime or the workhouses created by the British Poor Laws, which working to exhaustion or death. Children were indentured or sometimes 153

Witt, J.F. American Contagion (2020) pp. 38-40.

Id. at 129.

155 Bradwell v. Illinois (1876).

154

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sold outright by local magistrates. The typical owner viewed any demands from his workers for higher pay or fewer hours as a desire to “dine on turtle soup and venison with golden spoons.” 156 Charles Dickens’ description of factory workers in Hard Times demonstrates how machine-like they had become. The fictious factory town Coketown is described as “a town of red brick…if smoke and ashes had allowed it . . . it was a town of unnatural red-black . . . it was a town of machinery and tall chimneys out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves . . . it had a black canal in it . . . [and] being “inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next.” By describing the actions of Coketown workers as monotonous and repetitive, Dickens calls to mind the involuntary movements of machines. Marx said of Dickens that he had “issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together.” 157 As late as 1879. Great Britain remained the world’s leading industrial economy accounting for thirty-two percent of total world industrial production. By 1890, the United States surpassed Great Britain as the number one industrial producer in with nearly forty percent of world industrial output. The consequences of machinery and the development of the factory system were stupendous, unleashing productivity and wealth for the factory owners.

Before the industrial era, productivity and invention resulted 156 157

Dickens, C. Hard Times (1854).

Id.

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in a surplus of food and commodities that ultimately increased the population, which in turn consumed the surplus eventually leading to unemployment and pauperism among rural workers. Famine, disease and war would drain off the excess population until such time as a market equilibrium was achieved. This was the insight of Thomas Malthus - that productivity always reaches a dimensioning return because the rate of procreation always exceeds the surplus that productivity creates. 158 With industrialization and machines, increases in productivity raised the standard of living without succumbing to the weight of a fast growing populations. 159 But the concentration of great wealth made Americans uneasy. Monopolies squeezed out the small businessperson and producer, the inheritors of the republican tradition of virtue. Under the pressure of political and social reform, Congress enacted the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890.

Defenders of monopoly argued that the concentration of property was the result of natural forces and that any intervention by the national government would be a step on the road to serfdom. However, it became clear after the Civil War that concentrated corporate power was undermining the free enterprise system. Two years earlier, no less than President Grover Cleveland, delivered a broadside to Congress. It is worth repeating at length: We find the wealth and luxury of our cities mingled with poverty and wretchedness and unremunerative toil. We discover that the fortunes realized by our manufacturers are 158

Malthus, T. An Essay on the Principle on Population (Norton, 1976).

Paul Kennedy has compared the industrial revolution to the transformation of hunting society to the Neolithic farming society. See The Rise and Fall of the Powers (1987).

159

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no longer solely the reward of sturdy industry and enlightened foresight, but the result from a discriminatory favour of the government and were largely built upon undue exactions from the masses of our people. The gulf between employers and the employed is constantly widening, and classes are rapidly forming, one comprising the very rich and powerful, while another are found the toiling poor. We discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen struggling far in the rear, or is trampled to death beneath the iron heel. Corporations, which should be carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters.

Cleveland’s apocalyptic vision of class warfare was meant to justify the use of national power to regulate the excesses of the market, chief among them the widening, and in his view, the unsustainable wealth gap. The Haymarket strike and civil resistance in Chicago had galvanized and frightened the country earlier that year. Labor radicals and communists joined strikers and protestors to confront local police. August Spies opened the rally by climbing atop a hay wagon and giving a speech on the “good, honest, lawabiding, church-going citizens” who had been attacked at the McCormick factory. He was followed by Albert Parsons, a former Confederate soldier turned radical anarchist Toward the end of the Haymarket Square rally, a group of policemen arrived to disperse the crowd. As the police advanced, an individual who was never identified threw a bomb at them.

The police and possibly some members of the crowd opened fire and chaos ensued. Seven police officers and at least one 136 | P a g e

civilian died as a result of the violence that day, and an untold number of other people were injured. The country became inflamed and the subsequent trials made national news for months. Again, the American middle class grew anxious over domestic subversion and anarchy. Most preferred a strong police response but some were sympathetic to the workers’ plight. Small producers were wary of the monopolies but suspicious of unskilled laborers who acted like a mob.

Then, as now, it was the American middle class that held the entire economic system together. Their belief in private property, enterprise and opportunity constituted the bedrock of the free enterprise system. If the system, which was built on millions of Americans believing in the system’s virtue, was to be saved by its own excesses, the national government would need to act. Cleveland’s rhetoric created the momentum for the antitrust law, which declared illegal “every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade.” Portrayed as socialism by the entrenched business interests of the time, the law’s passage merely reflected longstanding, Adam Smith-type liberal economic orthodoxy: that competition was the cornerstone of free enterprise.

States soon followed with progressive labor laws but from the 1880’s to the 1930’s, courts struck down nearly every state law. Virtually all these decisions adopted traditional notions of laissez faire economics. In Lochner v. New York, the Supreme Court struck down a law prohibiting the employment of bakery workers for more than sixty hours per week. This conservative court was obliged to construe the Constitution in relation to its existing text looked at the word “liberty” in the Fourteenth Amendment and found the term

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“freedom of contract.” 160 “The general right to make a contract in relation to his business is part of the liberty protected by the [Constitution],” the court said. New York’s statute was “an illegal interference with the rights of individuals, both employers and employees, to make contracts regarding labor upon such terms as they think best.” Laws “limiting the hours in which grown and intelligent men may labor and are a living are mere meddlesome interferences with the rights of the individual” and so beyond the power of the legislature. 161 For the most part, courts adhered to economic orthodoxy and protected property rights and freedom of contract on whatever terms the market would bear. Labor unions were prosecuted under the federal antitrust law as illegal conspiracies to restrain interstate commerce. State equity courts enjoined strikes. The Supreme Court of the United States struck down a law preventing employers from establishing as a condition of employment that workers not belong to a labor union. The state of Kansas argued that the law was necessary to prevent workers from being coerced by employers to withdraw from a union. The court disagreed, insisting that a worker faced with such a choice was a “free agent” to decide for himself. Given the alternative of quitting the union or losing his job, the worker was “at liberty to choose what was best from a standpoint of his own interests” and “free to exercise a voluntary choice.” 162 it is uncertain what era the court was referring to here, the bygone era of the craftsman who owned his own tools and who was indeed a free agent or the industrial worker 160

The Fourteenth Amendment states, in part, that no state can deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

161 Lochner v. New York (1905).

162 Coppage v, Kansas (1915).

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dependent upon the employer for his wage? In any event, the court also found the time to channel Adam Smith stating “whenever the right to private property and the right to free contract coexist, each party when contracting is inevitably more or less influenced by the question whether he has much property, or little or none;” and to take a swipe at communist thinking by inveighing “unless all things are held in common, some persons must have more property than others. It is in the nature of things impossible to uphold freedom of contract and the right of private property without at the same time recognizing as legitimate those inequalities of fortune that are the necessary result of the exercise of those rights.”

Also, in 1890, the U.S. Superintendent of the Census reported that “up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier settlement . . . but at present the unsettled area has been broken into isolated bodies of settlement that these can hardly be called a frontier line. In this discussion of the [the frontier] extent, its westward movement, it cannot, therefore, any longer have a place in the census report.” To Frederick Jackson Turner, the influential historian, the brief official statement made by the census bureau meant that “the first period of American history had closed.”

In 1893, Turner delivered an address to the American Historical Society at the Chicago World’s Fair where he averred that “what the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities, that, and more, the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States directly.” 163 In short, the enormous and expanding opportunities afforded by the great expanse of the American 163

Turner, F.

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frontier to yeoman farmers, craft workers, entrepreneurs and speculators was coming to a close. The argument most likely affirmed what Americans had already surmised, that the United States was no longer a country comprised of study, independent pioneers.

Instead, millions of immigrants flooded the United States, most of whom, bound for factory jobs. Between 1880 and 1920, a time of both rapid industrialization and urbanization, America received more than 20 million immigrants. This rapid industrialization and prolific immigration had created a permanent class of wage workers.

Many of the country’s leading citizens grew concerned about how mass immigration and industrialization was transforming the society. At Harvard College, Theodore Roosevelt had been exposed to social Darwinism and had embraced the theory that inferior races could be improved by absorbing the culture of better races. At the same time, Roosevelt and noted public intellectuals worried that “alien” races would water down good American stock. 164 At the same time, they worried that the American male was growing soft. Specifically, a growing class of white collar workers had emerged to service the ever expanding industrial establishment – railroads, communications, banks, electric and gas utilities, and others. In particular, male office workers were often viewed as effeminate. 165 Male office clerks were antithetical to many American democracy, as make office workers were often viewed as chalky-faced dandies. 166 For nearly his entire adult life, Roosevelt worried about the feminization of the nation and prescribed 164

Thomas, E. The War Lovers (2010) 77-78.

Saval, N. Cubed (2014) 84.

166 Id. 15-16.

165

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over and over again the “strenuous life” to combat the weakening of the masculine virtues of hard work and sacrifice. “Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing,” he intoned.

Veblen, writing at this time, described the downside of the manly virtues as he saw them play out destructively in industrialization, subverting the community and creating only exploitive work: With the increasing density of population that follows from a heightened industrial efficiency, the group passes, by force of circumstances, from the archaic condition of poverty-stricken peace to a stage of predatory life. When a group emerges into this predatory phase of its development, the employments which most occupy men’s attention are employments that involve exploit. The most serious concern of the group, and at the same time the direction in which the most spectacular effect may be achieved by the individual, is conflict with men and beasts . . . The guiding animus of the group becomes a militant one, and men’s actions are judged from the standpoint of the fighting man.

As the predatory culture reaches a fuller development, there comes a distinction between employments.

Prowess comes near being recognized as the sole virtue. Other employments, in which people are occupied with tamely shaping inert materials to human use, become unworthy and end with becoming debasing. The tame employments, those that involve no obvious destruction of life and no spectacular coercion of refractory antagonists, fall into disrepute and are relegated to those members of the community who are defective in predatory 141 | P a g e

capacity; those who are lacking in massiveness, agility, or ferocity. Therefore, the able-bodied barbarian of the predatory culture, who is at all mindful of his good name, severely leaves all uneventful drudgery to the women and children of the group. He puts in his time in the manly arts of war and devotes his talents to devising ways and means of disturbing the peace. That way lies honor.

167

For some, war was embraced as a palliative to America’s social ills, as “all the great masterful races have been fighting races.� 168 At a widely publicized speech in 1890 at the Naval War College, Roosevelt stated: . . . there are higher things in this life than the soft and easy enjoyment of material comfort. It is through strife, or the readiness for strife, that a nation must win greatness. We ask for a great navy, partly because we feel that no national life is worth having if the nation is not willing, when the need shall arise, to stake everything in the supreme arbitrament of war, to pour out its blood, treasure, and its tears like water, rather than to submit to the loss of honor and renown. 169 The enthusiasm for national, manly expression soon took the form of territorial expansion as it had done in the prior century when the country pushed westward into the frontier, killing and displacing native Americans. The enthusiasm for

167

Veblen, The Instinct of Workmanship and the Irksomeness of Labor.

168

Thomas at 172.

Id.

169

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expansion was no doubt driven by commercial interests but in no small measure the sense that the national character needed a rebirth was an impetus. In 1898, the United States annexed the Hawaiian Islands. In addition to hosting extensive business interest, the islands were soon developed as a naval and military base. A year later, in a treaty marking the end of the “splendid little” four-month, two ocean war with Spain, the United States gained Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines. At the same time, the nation went through its first big corporate merger movement, which created the basic corporate-economic structure that exists today. By 1904, nearly half of the nation’s manufacturing capital was controlled by three hundred trusts. 170 The gulf between worker and employer became enormous, as was the distance between management and the stockholder.

Seemingly heading Roosevelt’s call for sacrifice and the fighting spirit, it was labor that rose up to win for itself a decent life.

Founded in 1905, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) also known as the “Wobblies", advocated for One Big Union comprised of industrial workers. In its first decades, the IWW created more than 900 unions located in more than 350 cities and towns in 38 states and territories of the United States and five Canadian provinces. Throughout the country, there were 90 newspapers and periodicals affiliated with the IWW, published in 19 different languages.

The IWW played a role in numerous strikes including the five-month textile mill strike in Paterson, New Jersey in 1913. In Paterson, skilled weavers, largely immigrants from Italy and eastern Europe, mobilized after a multiple-loom 170

Boorsten, P. The Americans: The Democratic Experience (1973) p.

419.

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system was introduced by owners to speed up production.

Demands included higher wages and an eight-hour workday.

Skilled weavers also demanded the removal of the new loom machines. An IWW campaign with mass meetings and a workers’ pageant, underwritten by artists and wealthy patrons, held at Madison Square Garden encouraged a mass walkout of thousands of skilled and unskilled workers, and their families, closing most of the city’s mills and dye houses.

Acts of resistance and mass protest were unrelenting throughout the long struggle. Vandals stoned houses and exploded bombs. The police arrested 1,800 people. 171 The strike ended when the owners simply outlasted the strikers who were near starvation. “At best, however, the owners 171

Adams, G. Age of Industrial Violence 1910-1915 (1966) at 90.

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won a Pyrrhic victory. Their adamant refusal even to discuss a settlement had prolonged the strike until it cost them $5,225,000. Neither they nor anyone else had devised any satisfactory method for adjudicating future disputes. Within four months the mill owners faced the possibility of a new walkout: serious labor troubles plagued Paterson far into the next decade.� 172 Paterson workers lost $4,160,000 in wages.

The findings of a federal commission found lawlessness on both sides of the strike. Citizens committees’ and private detectives hired by the owners knowingly violated the rights of speech and assembly and deployed various illegal and violent tactics. Vandals stoned houses and exploded bombs and striker replacements were followed and beaten. The IWW’s work lived on but the defeat hampered future organizing efforts, as more mainstream unions like the American Federation of Labor gained ground. The strike nevertheless was a cultural turning point for labor and what can be called the New Left, with a blending of mass protest with high culture and spectacle.

What stood between the employer and the wage worker?

Hardly anything. 173 In 1918, the Supreme Court of the United States invalidated a federal law restricting children to an eight-hour day declaring it beyond Congressional power to regulate local affairs. 174 A few years later, the court invalidated a federal law setting minimum wages for women

172

Id at 97.

In 1913, a reluctant President William Howard signed the bill creating the U.S. Department of Labor, ostensibly for mediating labor disputes and to compile and report labor statistics.

174 Hammer v. Dagenhart (1918).

173

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and children. 175 In striking down the law as an infringement on the freedom of contract, the court found that any “ethical” right Americans had to receiving a minimum wage was subordinate to the employer’s “legal right to determine a fair equivalent for the service rendered.” That same year, a proposed constitutional amendment giving power to Congress to “limit, regulate, and prohibit the employment of child labor” was predictably getting fierce resistance from business and industry but also from rank and file clergy as an inference in God’s edict that the father be the ruler of his family. 176 “The law which the God of nature has planted in the breasts of fathers and mothers is a sufficient guarantee in the great majority of cases for the careful nurture, training, education and development of children . . . [The amendment] tends to discredit and dethrone parents and subvert family government, substituting for parenthood a paternalistic government at Washington and empowering the federal Congress to stand in loco parentis to all the children in the country under eighteen years of age. This is nothing less than a monstrous proposal. “ 177 Interspersed in his legal argument agist the Amendment, James Emery, the General Counsel of the National Association of Manufacturers compared it to a communist plan to control the youth of America. 178

175

Adkins v. Children’s Hospital (1923).

The Twentieth Amendment was never ratified.

177 The Right Reverend Warren Chandler, Bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church quoted in Emery, J. An examination of the proposed Twentieth Amendment of the United States: being the so-called Child Labor Amendment. National Association of Manufacturers (1924).

178 Id. 176

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For nearly a century, the courts had placed the market out of reach of either state or federal laws that sought to level the field between employer and employee. Hostile to progressive legislation, the Court used post-Civil War notions of equality to declare that employers and workers were equals in the market, even though the employer had the predominate share of the bargaining power. The worker was simply left to fend for himself. Union organizing offered an alternative to increase bargaining power, but the Court held that employers could condition employment on not belonging to a union and, in any evet, most union pressure on the employer was illegal.

According to the courts, employers had the near unfettered right to do as they pleased beyond the reach of government regulation, either state or federal, to cut pay, engage in intimidation and coercion, shirk basic health and safety standards and to reduce the overall community of workers to poverty.

Plessy v. Ferguson was decided by the Supreme Court at the same time as it was declaring state wage and hour laws unconstitutional. On the one hand, states were not permitted 147 | P a g e

to enact economic legislation because employers and employees stood as equals and their equality was enshrined by the Constitution and reaffirmed by the Civil War amendments. On the other hand, states were left with their inherent power to enact social legislation permitting, even requiring, racial segregation because individuals were free to affiliate with whomever they pleased and the sovereign states had the power to express this public will. No doubt the Court believed that extremism in the defense of liberty was no vice. On the other hand, this decision led to more than fifty years of legal segregation, relegating millions of American citizens to inferior schools, housing and jobs and disenfranchising them from any meaningful political participation. "Legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instincts or to abolish distinctions based upon physical differences, and the attempt to do so can only result in accentuating the difficulties of the present situation,� the Court said. “If one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution cannot put them upon the same plane."

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Many workers, however, still retained the natural right to walk off the job. But at the time the United States was withdrawing its last troops from Europe in 1923, the Supreme Court held that striking, picketing and boycotting of industry is illegal under the federal antitrust law. 179 Striking workers faced severe monetary penalties, even jail.

Many Americans were divided over the decision and even Sinclair Lewis’ Zenith descends into two belligerent camps over the “labor question.” 180 When the antitrust law is amended on the wave of progressive reform to allow strikes and boycotts, the Supreme Court narrowly construes the law consistent with state equity cases that enjoined strikes.

Finding that even “peaceable persuasion” can unlawfully restrain trade, the court held that a strike or boycott is illegal if the purpose is to recognize a union.

The lawyer Clarence Darrow was correct when he stated the inalienable right to work meant “simply the inalienable right of the employer, without let or hindrance, to go out into the open market and bid for laborers on the hardest terms, or, rather, to so order the industrial world that all men and women and children must bid against each other for a right to toil . . . Under the conditions that now seem permanent and well assured, the workman is certain of two things in respect to [the right to work]. He has a right to go from place to place and ask for work. And if he finds no one who will take his service at living rates, he has a right to go to the poorhouse for support.” 181 179

Eastern States Retail Lumber Dealers’ Ass’n v. United States Lewis, S. Babbitt 181 Darrow, C. The Open Shop: A Defense of Union Labor. Little Blue Book No. 1425 (1929) at pp. 13-15.

180

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One of the big social tradeoffs of industrialism was the diminution of the craft tradition and the craft way of life. If the frontier had molded a type of rugged individualist with spontaneous ingenuity and know-how, industrialism seemed to require the concentration of money and machines and the centralization and specialization of knowledge. The courts at the time either could not, or did not, recognize that the local economy of the independent craftsman had been crushed by industrialization. Not only did the worker not own his own tools and thus was wholly dependent on the employer for a wage, the worker did not even own his own intrinsic knowledge of how to perform the job. As Alan Trachtenberg has observed, “the social distribution of knowledge begins a major shift with a transference (as far as technology and techniques are concerned) from bottom to top and in so doing to complete the process inherent in industrialization: the appropriation of inherited craft skills by industrial capital.” 182 The mass of traditional craft knowledge was simply obliterated by the machine and the division of labor which reaches its apogee with Frederick Taylor in Principles of Scientific Management published in 1911.

Taylor, a statistician, engineer and evangelist of productivity on the shop floor unleashed a management regime that reshaped the very nature of industrial work and revolutionized the division of labor. According to Taylor, “scientific management involves a complete mental revolution on the part of the workmen . . . and it involves the equally complete revolution on management’s side.” For now on, workers were told not to take any initiative or to use their ingenuity in performing their work. Instead, they would

182

Trachtenberg, A. The Incorporation of America (1982).

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be told to just “do your job.” Least they waste time in not doing it the “right way.” 183 No doubt there was a certain cognitive dissonance experienced by courts that believed in free labor yet nevertheless enforced arrangements impairing workers’ ability to pursue a livelihood. As Henry George noted in his influential book Progress and Poverty, written in 1879, codifying the unfettered competition between unequals was a deceit and a pretense. The freedom to contract obscured the harsher aspects of laissez faire legal rules as applied to the emerging class of poorly paid wage earners. Former employees were routinely sued by their employers for unfair competition and misappropriation of trade secrets.

The transformation of craft knowledge into trade secrets codified Taylorism into common law, as courts expanded the definition of intellectual property and the use of noncompete agreements to protect employer control over proprietary knowledge gained by workers on the job and which was once considered an attribute of skilled craft workers and regulated by guilds or other associations.

Guilds, in fact, promoted informal knowledge-sharing in arguing against the broad application of patent protection for inventions.

However, as industrialization progressed, courts increasingly rejected the artisanal tradition of knowledge diffusion in favor of exclusive corporate control of workplace knowledge. William Howard Taft provided one of the most articulate defenses of this new legal doctrine during his tenure as a state court judge. Taft, of course, is the

183

As Jules Verne wrote of the mid-nineteenth-century United States, “The Yankees are engineers the way Italians are musicians and Germans are metaphysicians: by birth.”

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only American to serve as both President and justice (later chief justice) of the U.S. Supreme Court.

In Cincinnati Bell Foundry v. Dodds, Taft held that the technique for making bells was a trade secret and therefore Dodds could be enjoined from using or disclosing it even in the absence of an express contract not to disclose or use his employer’s secrets. This case signified the demise of the craft tradition of employee control over workplace knowhow and tacit knowledge and the rise of the modern, corporate notion that an implied term of any employment relationship is employer control of value-added knowledge.

In so doing, Taft mixed traditional notions of employees’ duty of loyalty to his employer with the concept that employment was a matter of contractual obligations.

Several years after Cincinnati Bell Foundry, while on the sixth circuit court of appeals, Taft wrote the opinion in United States v. Addyston Pipe & Steel Co. Here the court enforced a covenant not to compete contained in a sale of a business. Since the question in Addyston was whether to enforce a contract, the case compelled Judge Taft to reconcile liberty of contract with freed to exercise private property (labor). Implicitly the court found that in the nature of corporate employment, knowledge and know-how were separable from human labor, thus transforming artisanal knowledge into corporate intellectual property. By the turn of the twentieth century, industrialism had supplanted local artisanal customs and traditions as the new foundational concept of labor and property.

Patent law also became a formidable basis for corporate power. Before the Civil War, patents were difficult to enforce and most inventors spent most of their time suing infringers and imitators. But as corporations replaced 152 | P a g e

individuals as the primary holders of patents, courts more closely scrutinized infringement claims.

However, industrialization and technological and social changes caused by the concentration of capital and investment caused a shift in intellectual property law. Monopolies were generally recognized as the result of superior effort, skill and intellect and thus the law enabled the corporate inventor.

Like the individual inventor, to enjoy the just benefits of its innovation. In the same unmediated way that natural selection drove evolution of the species, monopolies balanced the economy, maximizing productivity and innovation, and propelled profit growth , at the expense the individual worker. The liberty and freedom enshrined in the constitutional framework as bulwarks against government tyranny and mob rule had led to the absolutism of capital.

In mass production, time is of the essence. Retained by major establishments, Taylor broke down every operation on the factory floor into its simplest tasks and then timed each one to find out the most efficient way of performing it. His concepts of time study and the notion of the elementary task soon became the organizational paradigm of the great manufacturing enterprises. Following these principles, manufacturers were able to perfect mass production, nowhere more dramatically than the automobile industry.

For Motor Company improved on Taylor’s concept of dividing the work into simple, repetitive tasks, as Smith had observed before in the pin factory, by creating the assembly line. On this line, a worker would install a simple part with a basic, uncomplicated task. Thousands of workers simply repeated thousands of simple tasks, a thousand times of day.

Intrusive counting systems were installed to maximize efficiency and productivity throughout the day, day after

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day. In short, the workman on the shop floor were as interchangeable as the gears in the machine.

Augustus Hahl, a German immigrant, made his first pneumatic master clock in 1877. The pneumatic clock system with a master clock synchronized to “slave clocks” on the shop floor strictly enforced work schedules and were intended to instill time discipline and preserve the social order and underline moral values. Soon workers clocked-in and clocked-out, were docked pay for being late and were sometimes rewarded for their punctuality. Public schools soon adopted the same time system.

Additionally, Taylor’s follower W.H. Leffingwell rationalized the white collar office with extensive timemotion studies of office workers. “There are millions of unnecessary motions, and when begins to investigate the office with an eye on these alone, one comes to believe that most of them are in the office. 184 Time motion photography 184

Saval, N. Cubed 2014) at p. 57 quoting Leffingwell, Scientific Office Management (1917).

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showed a 20 percent time savings in stuffing envelopes through the elimination of useless motions. A file clerk’s hair curling or straightening her blouse would reduce office productivity. Leffingwell’s goal, almost entirely achieved, was to reproduce Taylor’s assembly line model for the factory floor for the office. On the other hand, Leffingwell empathized the importance of rest and hydration, although a well-designed office would reduce the number of steps taken to get the rest room. And to achieve this efficiency, a sense of being watched hung over the entire office as workers “felt themselves turned into objects . . . “ 185 Taylor and the timekeepers viewed themselves as great progressives and believed that industrial efficiency would create the greatest good for the greatest number of people and that the newly acquired leisure time that would result would lift society to a more enlightened plane. The simplification of factory work created jobs for millions of illiterate workers and mass production increased the standard of living for millions more. Critics demurred, calling the application of scientific management “a thoroughly totalitarian philosophy, and merely a rationale for cutting costs. In the last analysis, its success depended on workers working harder and the elimination of loafers.

Taylor’s reputation and fame were based on the promise of lower labor costs for businessmen. “ 186 However, while lowering labor costs and increasing efficiency – doing more with less – may have been the primary reason for firms to adopt scientific management principles, Taylor made explicit the core mission of his program: for management to take possession of the “mass traditional knowledge” once 185 186

Id. at p. 62 Kolko, G. The Triumph of Conservatism (1963).

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held by workers themselves, the knowledge handed down to them by word of mouth, through the many years in which their trade has been developed from the primitive condition.”

In short, industrialism, enabled by improved machinery and scientific management crushed the craft tradition and, in effect, created a class of wage workers who were viewed primarily as sub-human, incapable of owning or applying their own how-how and ingenuity. 187 To the social critics, it is industrial capitalism that has corrupted most wage work, has made it a commodity and unnatural. Here, a quote Marx is in order to illustrate the point: Milton, for example, who did Paradise Lost, was an unproductive worker. In contrast to this, the writer who delivers hackwork for his publisher is a productive worker.

Milton produced Paradise Lost in the way that a silkworm produces silk, as the expression of his own nature. Later on he sold the product for £5 and to that extent became a dealer in a commodity. But the Leipzig literary proletarian who produces books, e.g. compendia on political economy, at the instructions of his publisher is roughly speaking a productive worker, in so far as his production is subsumed under capital and only takes place for the purpose of the latter’s valorization. A singer who sings like a bird is an unproductive worker. If she sells her singing for money, she is to that extent a wage laborer or a commodity dealer. But 187

Industrial labor unions had little choice to Taylorize wages. By 1950, General Motors its collective bargaining agreement with the United Auto Workers had divided the hour into six-minute periods, had fragmented the work to fit the periods, and the worker was paid by the number of tenths of an hour worked. Thus, the worker was paid while “on the clock” rounding for six minute intervals of non-activity.

Heckscher, C. The New Unionism (1988) p. 20.

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the same singer, when engaged by an entrepreneur who has her sing in order to make money, is a productive worker, for she directly produces capital. A schoolmaster who educates others is not a productive worker. But a schoolmaster who is engaged as a wage laborer in an institution along with others, in order through his labor to valorize the money of the entrepreneur of the knowledge-mongering institution, is a productive worker. 188 In other words, if work is performed as the expression of one’s nature, a form of self-expression, I would more than likely perform it, as the silkworm does, because it would be satisfying in and of itself, whether paid or not. If I were to be fortunate enough to get paid for expressing myself through my work, then I would also be able to make a livelihood in a market economy. In that case, I would be “living the dream” by getting paid to perform something that was in my nature to perform, in effect, getting paid for my satisfaction. As long as we live and work in a market economy, this state of affairs is as good a definition of happiness as I have come across – to be compensated for my satisfaction. There are powerful intrinsic motivators for satisfying work – happiness, in and of itself, and feelings of pride and self-worth; and, considering that all work is completely socialized, performed in the public domain, external social rewards such as status and prestige count for a great deal as well. In all cases, the rewards for satisfying work are direct and personal; and, given that the market pays a premium for creativity that cannot be replaced by a machine, it is more likely than not that as personal satisfaction increases, so does the pay, in a virtuous cycle of increased satisfaction and higher pay. Therefore, if the 188

Marx, K. Das Kapital p. 165

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satisfied worker were to get rich on her work, and not having need for any more income, she would probably continue to perform it, at least in some capacity. 189 To end it would be like losing an appendage – an arm or leg, perhaps. If, on the other hand, she was working only for the money, like the hack writer, she would probably quit after “making it.”

Aside from fame, making enough money in order to quit working may be the primary motivating force for professional athletes, movie stars, entertainers, record producers, and many entrepreneurs who dream of selling their business to Amazon.

Therefore, working as a consequence of one’s nature, to do what one was born to do, is to be happy; and happiness is the point, to be happy is one of the main purposes of life on earth. 190 On the other hand, working only for money has no purpose other than to participate in the market economy.

Even covering the necessities of food, shelter, medical care, education and recreation, that participation is entirely socially defined and exists outside the person. The products that we buy are the commodities by which we measure our social status, they are commoditized expressions of a commodified self, as billions of dollars a year are spent on

189

This is different than “retirement” which can be an entire change in lifestyle that replaces work with play.

190 An objective view of happiness was introduced by Socrates, and later developed by his pupil, Plato. They put forth the notion that happiness was “secure enjoyment of what is good and beautiful.”

Plato developed the idea that the best life is one whereby a person is either pursuing pleasure of exercising intellectual virtues. Plato: The Symposium. Hamilton, W. ed (1999)

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creating an emotional attachment to the commodity. 191 The work that produces the income to buy these status symbols is also a commodity, it is sold for a wage and is therefore merely a means to an end for the seller. And that is why most people would quit their jobs if they could. In other words, for many people as much as half of all their waking hours are spent on making enough money for necessities.

The activity itself is aimless, without purpose other than to earn enough money to engage in the multitude of market transactions that money can buy, whether necessary or discretionary. Their identities are based on what they purchase, not on what they produce. Psychologists have linked this behavior to dep seated insecurity and anxiety. 192 Their self-esteem is based on what they buy, not on what they do. And their self-worth is measured by status consumption rather than on their work product. And perhaps it is social status that makes them happy and it is their consumption of status symbols that gives their life purpose.

Merchandisers and advertisers pray to their god that such is the case. 193 We call commoditized work a job, work that is imposed on us by the market, which is a series of tasks given to employees to perform under the direction of others. The rewards associated with a job are external and not personal.

191

Social media platforms like Facebook are much the same, the expression of a commoditized self.

192 WSJ Nov. 21, 2020 https://www.wsj.com/articles/love-andmoneyand-how-theyre-connected-11605917843?mod=mhp 193

The estimated U.S. ad expenditure in 2019 was $240.7 billion, up from $223.7 billion recorded in 2018. https://www.statista.com/statistics/272314/advertising-spending-inthe-us/

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The rewards for commoditized work are extrinsic, derived and measured by the market, not arising from the person and relying on a kind of fantasy that a the status consumer is being watched flouting a status brand and judged by others, perhaps in envy. Social media “likes” enhance the fantasy.

As a means to an end, the job could be meaningless but the end, status and consumption, the envy of others, could be pleasurable. The economist John Maynard Keynes observed that the needs of human beings “fall within two classes those needs which are absolute in the sense that we may feel them whatever the situation of our fellow human beings may be, and those which are relative only in that satisfaction lifts us above, makes us feel superior to, our fellows.” Robert Frank, an economist at Cornell University, has repopularized Keynes seminal observation and has observed that “keeping up with the Jones’” is the driving force of consumption. But there could be tension. “[T]he only meaning in the job is a paycheck, not anything connected to the work or product. Work appears as something unnatural, a disagreeable, meaningless and stultifying condition of getting the paycheck, devoid of dignity as well as importance . . . No wonder this this results in an unhappy disconnected worker – because a paycheck is not enough to base one’s self-respect on. “ 194 Thus, the consumer that is driven by status lives in a constant state of doubt and insecurity as to whether their lives have any meaning beyond the commercial realm. For the more affluent, consumption has become a type of entitlement. Consumer products from sneakers to iPods, from alcohol to junk food, cater to this vague notion of freedom and liberation. Thus, consumption itself is experienced as a form of personal freedom, autonomy and self-expression. Since consumption lies at the 194

Drucker, P. Concept of the Corporation (1943) p. 179.

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core of experience, work which may require delayed gratification, is viewed as unsatisfactory. As work is viewed as a means to consume, the wage slave of the nineteenth century has been replaced by the debt slave of the twenty first.

Exploitation of the stupefied worker is also of critical concern to the critics of capitalism who focus primarily on wage workers who experience the pressure for production that destroys their human relationships, leading to wider alienation and hostility. But many seem perfectly willing to make this trade off every day, to work for the weekend, as the saying goes and to be content with what the paycheck can buy. As observed by the great sage George Carlin: “Most people work just hard enough not to get fired and get paid enough not to quit.� But even as the critics of the Organization Man and the neo-Marxists leveled their charges of shallowness and over conformity against the mindless corporate drones, the case against market-based employment was anachronistic. As Herbert Gans described in his full-scale sociological study of one of the first planned American suburb, the suburban lifestyle for the typical middle-class American was much fuller and far richer than anything that preceded it. 195 The post-war economic boom made possible by mass production, greater access to education, and government policies between 1948 and 1968 propelled millions of Americans into the middle class.

Greater economies of scale in manufacturing and the decentralization of industry from the cities, propelled suburban development. A far superior lifestyle, both materially and even spiritually, was achieved by those who were not left behind in the increasingly deteriorating urban 195

Gans, H. The Levittowners (1967).

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core. The new suburbanites made home the center of their lives and the home was child-centered, not centered on work, although the egotistical, hard-driving executive may have been the exception.

Forgotten was the “intolerant Puritanism which triggered the attack against pleasure and enjoyment.” 196 Affluence and education made the difference and for many Americans “life was no longer a fight for survival anymore; they have been able to move into a community in which income and status are equitably enough distributed so that neighbors are no longer treated as enemies; even if they are still criticized for social and cultural deviance.” 197 Further, the big corporation, while employing only 10 percent of the working population, nevertheless became a dominant social institution. There was no clear limit to its desirable size. The corporation was glorified as the nation’s steward and caretaker. It produced its apostles and high priests. One of the most devout, Peter Drucker, proselytized that the big corporation was the institution that set “the standard for the way of life and the mode of living of our citizens; which leads, molds, directs; which determines our perspective on our society; around which crystallize our problems and to which we look for our solutions.”

However, as observed by Whyte, the immediate post-war generation was not entirely comfortable with surrendering their autonomy to the corporate way of life. Having been raised during a time when rugged individualism was venerated, they experienced anxiety and guilt when giving up their individuality. It was a difficult choice: freedom and opportunity versus conformity and security. Everything that this generation had been taught weighed in favor of freedom 196 197

Id, at p. 419.

Id.

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and independence as the dominant social values. No longer able to express individuality through autonomous selfdirected work, the Corporation Man submerged his ego and directed his energies instead to consumption. In the past, self-worth was measured by individual achievement, what an individual made of himself. Without that avenue of selfactualization, the self-worth of the Corporation Man became inevitably measured by what he consumed not by what he created.

Nevertheless, that generation experienced harrowing handto-mouth insecurity and suffered enormous stress and social pathology. During the pre- World War II worldwide economic depression, the nation learned a stark lesson in mass unemployment. In a landmark study concluded in 1938, researchers Eisenberg and Lazersfield documented that long-term unemployed workers experienced fear, feelings of inferiority and shame. They explained the progressive stages of unemployment: First there is shock, which is followed by an active hunt for a job, during which the individual is still optimistic and unresigned; he still maintains and unbroken attitude. Second, when all efforts fail, the individual becomes pessimistic, anxious, and suffers active distress; this is the most crucial state of all. And third, the individual becomes fatalistic and adopts himself to his new state but with a narrower 163 | P a g e

scope. He now has a broken attitude.

This powerful description of the “broken man” was later supported by psychological studies demonstrating that job loss ranks just behind death of a loved one, discovery of a serious disease and divorce as a producer of serious psychological stress. Moreover, suicide, crime, depression and other personal and social problems were associated with prolonged job loss. The post-war “organization man” remembered growing up during the Depression as children, many were dislocated and traumatized. Others watched silently perhaps as their own parents became broken. The profound sense of insecurity and fear left an indelible mark on this generation.

Moreover, the vicissitudes of the market could be brutal, and the individual was essentially alone. Within memory, both white and Black Americans who were poor or unemployed were viewed as society’s waste products, as degenerates and 164 | P a g e

underserving of help. “Prowling negroes and shabby whites” were jailed and used as forced laborers on chain gangs, the displaced or chronically unemployed worker, white and Black, was an abject moral failure, unfit even for Christian charity. 198 Certainly, poverty can breed profound social dysfunction and middle class and affluent Americans saw firsthand the alcoholism, wife beating and child abuse within the multitude of families without a functioning, working adult. 199 Tenements were notorious places for crime and disease and to affluent Americans the poor lived like animals. Eugenics was to be their final solution although to others like Upton Sinclair, the focus on eugenics obscured the economic issues. “Everybody knows the true nature of the remedy, which would be the paying of sufficient wages, and the tearing down of the filthy tenements into which the laborers are packed.” 200 Years after the Paterson Strike in 1913, Ann Korn remembered living the living conditions in the city: We lived in a four-family house. Right behind our kitchen black people lived, their outhouses faced our kitchen. They had diarrhea. They were even poorer than we. We paid $13 a month rent. We had a toilet in the hall.

It was a long walk to school. I don’t think we ever had any woolen clothes. We children of five, six, seven, we cried with the cold 198

Novak, W. The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth Century America (19916) at p. 24.

199 No doubt, middle class men beat their children and wives and kept their mistresses, but middle class norms gave these miscreants an air of respectability.

200 Sinclair, U. Damaged Goods (1913) at p. 158.

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My mother died when I was ten. I always felt my mother died from poverty, because really the fact that I didn’t learn till I was ten, or close to ten, that people drank whole milk, will give you an idea of how things were in those days. We would drink water, a little milk for coloring and sugar and that was our drink. That’s what I thought was the way that people lived. I didn‘t know any other way. 201 Certainty whites working for starvation wages in the nineteen and into the twentieth century were no better off than Black workers. Both were despised, beaten and brutalized by masters and owners, the police and the military, enabled by courts, academics, clergy and thought leaders. Both were seen as little more than subhuman. Even the white clergy thought their status was preordained. But it was probably racial suspicion and hatred that prevented worker solidarity. Since colonial times, the Black man posed a threat to the white man’s livelihood.

Later, immigrants, from Ireland, later from southern Europe were viewed in the same manner. Unions remained segregated until the 1950s, and even then, begrudgingly. By then, the United States was as segregated as apartheid South Africa. Racial hatred is endemic to America. How else could a white, Christian society have cohered around slavery, segregation and brutality? Blacks were hunted and killed in the South and racial segregation was just as pronounced in the northern cities as any in the South. Imprisonment through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for vagrancy, prostitution and other social crimes fell disproportionally on 201

Treacy, M.J. Paterson 1913: The Silk Strike (2017) 54 file:///C:/Users/eanj/AppData/Local/Temp/Game%20Manual.pdf

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Black men and women. The death penalty was meted out far more to Blacks than whites. 202 Today, when a Black man carries a gun as an expression of his masculinity, it is called a crime. When a white man does the same, it is called his constitutional right. After the incarceration of almost an entire generation of Black men, white men must now feel safe advocating for unlimited gun ownership. That is how America has traditionally dealt with the so-called unemployable, through incarceration. Prison reform is a bipartisan issue today because it is now a white problem. For generations, the unemployed Black man has been pushed to the margins of society. Today, the white man follows. Marx and the social critics that followed into the mid-and latetwentieth century were never able to explain why Americans lacked the class consciousness to revolt against exploitive capitalism as workers had done in other countries. Racial animus, pitting white workers against Black workers is a primary reason why American workers, as a whole, did not revolt as did their European counterparts. Joined in despair, the white man nevertheless cannot be in solidarity with the Black man because even as the Black middle class has grown and as Black men and women have filled the ranks of the professional classes, regardless of the white man’s ignorance, vulgarity and depravity, to him, his racism makes him superior.

Additionally, for those who did take to the streets when there was no other alternative, the full force of local, state and federal law enforcement was unleashed on militant strikers, as many were beaten, imprisoned and executed. Strikers in important industries were threatened with conscription. Yet, a mass revolution of the so-called working class never happened. Certainly, the revolution in Russia was a bad 202

Trotter, Jr. J.W. Workers on Arrival: Black Labor in the Making of America (2019) pp. 105-106

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omen. America was not apt to engage in another civil war, although it did get close during the strikes and violence of 1877 – 1878. The Lockean principles of property and the Puritan belief in work and upward mobility are deeply engrained in the American psyche. So is the fear of being marginalized for not having a job. Additionally, most immigrants were not the degenerates or radicals portrayed by xenophobes and racialists, but rather were fervent believers in the values of work and family.

Louis Nana was born in Italy in 1904. His family came to the United States when he was sixteen years old. The had to quit school on arrival and worked as a plumbers helper then became a tool and die maker. “The first week there I saved that man thousands of dollars, he remembered in retirement in 1983.

I designed him a fixture that enabled one man instead of two to do a particular operation.

Boy, when the boss saw that, glory Jesus, he was so happy.

Then with a shack blade that he had there and an old-fashioned grinder – you almost killed yourself turning it back and forth – I made the most beautiful die for that man. He was so happy. After I was working almost a year there he gave me a raise. I was getting about three and a quarter an hour. In those days that was a good wage, you know. This is going back thirty years or more. 203

203

Wright, G & Green, H. Work New Jersey Ethnic Life Series (1987) 44

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Nana was dismissed from his tool and die job during the Great Depression. While he disliked the decision, his wife, Edna, took a job in a laundry.

When the depression came, first half the factory was laid off and then the other half. I was one of the last. So, I got a job with the [Works Projects Administration]. We got four dollars a day but worked only three days a week, twelve dollars a week. We got by because Edna went to work. That’s the only time I had her work. She worked in a laundry: she didn’t make much but it helped out a little bit.

But after things got straightened up, I told her to quit. She never worked since; she was always a housewife.

204

Nana “straightened up” when, after years of tinkering with clocks and watches, he opened up a watch repair shop.

I opened up my own business in Newark [New Jersey] on Columbia and Green Streets.

I took a bench room with a jeweler named Robert Vann. The guy downstairs was doing bad work, so when I got in the building, Mr. Vann told the other jewelers. “We have a good watchmaker in the building now,” and he meant me. Little by little, I got work from these jewelers, and that’s how I built my business. I got such a big name in there, the guy downstairs went broke. 205

204 205

Id at 26.

Id at 44.

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Nana returned to tool and die making in the late nineteen thirties as demand picked up near the end of the long depression decade. During the war he worked for the Bendix Corporation in Teterboro, New Jersey until his retirement.

He and Edna remained married for over sixty years. Fondly looking back, he proudly said, “Anybody that I did a job for, he got good work. That’s why I have a great reputation. I’ve got the greatest reputation on clocks and tools that anybody could wish to have.” 206 The Marxists also underestimated the transformative impact of new technologies and mass consumption. By 1995, new and better machines on the factory floor were producing the same amount of work as twelve assembly line workers did in 1955. 207 In 2020, over sixty percent of Americans worked in the service economy, not on the factory floor, up from eighteen percent a century before. About eight of ten of these workers were administrators, managers, professionals and technicians. Only about ten percent of Americans worked in the manufacturing sector. While many workers were caught in unpleasant or boring jobs, the increase in the standards of living caused by the massive productivity gains more than compensated for the monotony.

Moreover, government policies also reformed many of the abuses of laissez faire market capitalism, reducing hours and setting minimum wages, among many other labor reforms.

During the economic depression of 1930 - 1939, business leaders were in a state of panic. National income fell from $85 billion to $37 billion and wages fell by forty percent.

Twenty five percent of the workforce was unemployed. As 206 207

Id. 44-45.

Rifkind, J. The End of Work (1995) pp. 38-39.

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conditions got worse and became more dire still, the dual creeds of laissez faire economics and Social Darwinism were eventually swept away by the palpable fear of economic and social collapse. As pointed out by Richard Hofstadler, by the time Franklin Roosevelt took office in 1933, “a silent revolution had taken place in public opinion . . . that henceforth, for the purposes of the recovery, the federal government was to be responsible for the condition of the labor market as part of its concern with the industrial problem as a whole.” Eventually, government policies provided emergency relief, unemployment insurance, retirement security, subsidies for farms, small businesses, home ownership, college educations and healthcare; unions were legalized and for decades, labor unions provided the same protections for workers as the guilds did for the craftsman and artisan. The Supreme Court reluctantly moved from free market orthodoxy to pragmatism upholding federal minimum wage, overtime pay and child labor laws and the National Labor Relations Act of 1936 which legalized the “closed shop” making union membership mandatory for workers after a union is recognized. The Act also legalized strikes, pickets and boycotts as tools to achieve union recognition. In part, the fear of radical and other radical-populist solutions led to the passage of the Social Security Act provided Americans with a wide but still shallow safety net. Still, it was opposed by many business leaders as reckless and irresponsible, communistic and as an act of dictatorship. 208 208

The Works Projects Administration was an employment and infrastructure program created by President Roosevelt in 1935, during the bleakest years of the Great Depression. Over its eight years of existence, the WPA put roughly 8.5 million Americans to work, Louis Nana among them.

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In 1941, as the country was preparing for war, A. Philip Randolph, the founder and leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, planned a mass march of the nation’s capital to demand more jobs for Black workers in the defense industries. The military buildup that followed eight years of domestic spending (generally referred to as the “New Deal”) on public works, bridges, tunnels, parks, schools, hospitals, housing, post offices, public art and theater and much more had ended the economic depression for millions of unemployed white workers but tens of thousands of Black workers remained unemployed. Before the scheduled day of the march, President Franklin Roosevelt met with Randolph to issue an executive order declaring that “there shall be no discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries or government because of race, creed, color or national origin.” Executive Order 8802 represented the federal government’s strongest equal employment action since Reconstruction. Roosevelt also agreed to establish a war time Employment Practices Committee which had the authority to investigate job discrimination in the defense industries. Under the impact of the Committee, Blacks employed in war production jobs rose from under three percent in 1942 to eight percent in 1944. 209 Tens of thousands of men and women, Black and white, found jobs in nearly every American city that had a defense plant or shipyard. Shortly after the war was declared, the big national unions called for solidarity with management, a wave of strikes and work stoppages swept U.S. defense plants not because of conflicts with management but because of competition between union factions. More than 35,000 strikes took place in 1941 alone, cutting defense production by twenty-five percent. Most of these strikes were not over 209

Trotter, J.W. Workers on Arrival: Black labor in the Making of America (2019) at p. 136

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wages or working hours. Instead, the worst damage was inflicted by the rivalry between the American Federation of Labor, which organized skilled workers according to their crafts and the Congress of Industrial Organizations, which sought to organize workers by industry. In a full employment economy, the two organizations fought it out over money and power. The strikes were crippling to the war effort and could not have occurred at the worst time. In response, Congress passed the Smith-Connally Act, which required a 60-day colling off period before a strike. Vetoed by Roosevelt under intense pressure from his labor union base, the U.S. Senate took exactly eleven minutes to override. A crippling miner’s strike over pay and working conditions was the last straw, as Congress voted to give the president extraordinary powers to seize vital war industries when necessary and to conscript strikers into the military, thus compelling them to work under the military penalty of mutiny.

War time greatly influenced national politics. Roosevelt kept labor support with his veto of the Smith-Connelly Act, but his administration exercised the power given to him with the veto override. The Army seized the mines and later the railroads during a national rail strike. Undeterred, strikes continued during the war. The Army seized sixty-seven defense plants to workers back on the job. Even in 1944, the last full year of the war, there were no fewer than 4,950 work stoppages costing 8.7 million workdays – enough to build two thousand more aircraft to deploy against Germany and Japan.

For the many owners who fought against unionization before the war and used the courts to get workers back on the job, labor unrest during wartime was not much of a surprise. Indeed, such dangerous and unpatriotic conduct by unions fit the narrative of corrupt union bullies who pursued their featherbedding interests by nefarious means at the expense of the workers that they 173 | P a g e

purported to represent. The American home front during war time was much more complex and disturbing than the nostalgic portrayals of Americans solemnly and steadfastly cooperating and sacrificing during the war. Of, course many did cooperate and sacrifice . But strikes, even race riots, inflamed America throughout the war; and as the Truman Committee uncovered, fraud and gross negligence was practiced by many defense contractors. With such internal conflict during war time, it is just as likely that compulsory national and military service, the temporary suspension of some civil liberties, and wartime profiteering won the war.

Roosevelt’s message to Congress on the State of the Union in 1944, with the end of the Second World War in plain view sets out the vision for post-war United States. An excerpt from the speech given by the war weary president to a war weary nation will suffice here: It is our duty now to begin to lay the plans and determine the strategy for the winning of a lasting peace and the establishment of an American standard of living higher than ever before known.

This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights. They were our rights to life and liberty.

As our nation has grown in size and stature, however — as our industrial economy expanded — these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.

We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. "Necessitous men are not free men."

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People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.

In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all — regardless of station, race, or creed.

Among these are: • • •

•

• • •

•

The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation; The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation; The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living; The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad; The right of every family to a decent home; The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health; The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment; The right to a good education.

All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and wellbeing.

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America's own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for our citizens.

Demobilizing from the war was difficult. Many Black workers were replaced by returning white veterans by employers acting in concert with the discriminatory practices of labor unions. Many Black veterans could not land a job upon their return. Transition to a peacetime economy, at least initially, was disastrous. No year in the United States, before or since, experienced so many workers on strike, or so many industries on strike, as 1946. Enabled by the national labor law and a labor-friendly federal government, union membership during the war had doubled.

Now, immediately after the war labor disruptions and stoppages were mostly about wages and the demand for wage increases exploded in a wave of labor unrest. When employers tried to replace strikers, general industry strikes were called. When negotiations broke down and railroad workers walked off the job for a second time in five years, President Harry Truman seized the railroads and threatened to use the army as strike breakers. The Administration also 176 | P a g e

seized tugboats when a dock workers’ strike disrupted fuel shipments into New York City.

During this tumult, business and industry have their own notions about seizing the political moment. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and other business groups re-ignited a “rightto-work� campaign that achieved stunning success. The first right-to-work campaign had been spearheaded ten years earlier by the Christian American Association, which condemned the pro-labor policies of the New Deal as a Jewish plot organized as labor leaders to threaten racial segregation, warning that unions would force white and Black workers into an alliance. 210 The aftermath of the Second World War, with the full recognition of the Nazi atrocities, the Christian American Association and similar groups fell outside the political mainstem for a while. There was also an unease with a capitalist system that so easily embraced fascism, social Darwinism and racism. The Nazi practice of eugenics led to the ghoulish medical experiments on human beings and the extermination of millions. American companies like International Business Machines easily and gladly conducted business with German companies up to and including 1940. American-made counting machines were used by German bureaucratic to facilitate the roundup and transportation of millions of people to concentration and, ultimately, death camps.

With anti-Semitism, if not overt racism, outside the political mainstream for a short time after the war, business, civic and religious leaders re-tooled and galvanized to fight the threat of union thugs, communism and oppressive central 210

The New Yorker, Aug 24, 2020 at page 39

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government.

In the 1946 Congressional elections, Republicans took control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate with a veto-proof majority.

The first item of business was reining in the unions and over Truman’s veto, the Taft-Hartley Act was enacted. Among other things. The Act allowed states to outlaw the closed shop, thus giving workers the opportunity to opt out. The Act also allowed employers to actively dissuade union organizing and membership. In three consolidated decisions, the Supreme Court of the United States upheld the validity of state “right-to-work” laws, holding that “states have the power to legislate against what are found to be injurious practices in their internal commercial and business affairs” and that state legislatures were no longer going to be put “in a straightjacket when they attempt to suppress business and industrial conditions which they regard as offensive to the public welfare.”

Finally, however, as a natural consequence of America’s military position after Second World War and for a good many years thereafter, an American worker produced much of what the rest of the world consumed. Almost everyone had to buy from or sell to Americans, as the United States represented an unprecedented two thirds of the entire world’s industrial capacity. 211 In 1950, the Gross National Product of the Unites States was greater than Great Britain, France, West Germany, Japan and Italy combined. 212 A modern welfare state developed simultaneously with the fringe benefits provided by corporate paternalism. Albeit, sociologist C. Wright Mills made a game effort to show that white-collar workers in America had undergone “proletarianization,” specifically, white-collar workers sold

211 212

Thurow, L. The Future of Capitalism (1996), p. 138.

Kennedy, P. Rise and Fall of Great Powers (1987) p. 369.

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“pieces of their personality,” rather than physical labor. 213 Though their work was becoming just as routinized as the factory worker, they were loath to identify themselves as a class with homogenous political interests. In any event, post war stability gave rise to an economic security unknown to the majority of Americans and those Americans chose security over class antagonism, the security that was critiqued for being overly conforming, banal, vapid and sterile. Wright referred to these white collar workers as “little people” and “followers” but had no answer for the ecstatic shop worker who felt liberated when he snagged his first white collar office job: The import of twenty dollars a week! Of being the head of a department employing twenty-five girls. Of wearing a good suit again! Sitting at an official desk in the corner commanding a charming river view and feeling at last, after two months in that menial department below stairs . . . [N]ow there was an employment office for recruiting help, a company doctor, a company hospital, a special dining room in the main building, where officials at the company were allowed to dine – but no others – and that he, being an accredited department head could now lunch with those others in that special restaurant if he chose to and could afford it. 214 Mills all but invented the prototype of the rebel intellectual on campus and was the model for the radical chic professorate of the sixties and seventies. The while collar proletariat that he skewered was of a unique generation.

213

C. Wright Mills. White Collar p. 188.

Theodore Dreiser’s protagonist Clyde Griffins in An American Tragedy (1925) 214

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Traumatized by seeing their parents broken by the depression of the thirties may went off to war or to war plants, subject to danger and death aboard and anxiety and deprivation at home. Wanting a secure domestic life after the war and the right to enjoy something of a peace dividend seemed understandable under the circumstances. However, alarmed by the prospect of a war with the Soviet Union and what the Truman Administration viewed as a softening of Americans’ moral fiber and a general loss of enthusiasm for democracy, a propaganda and public relations onslaught was launched to re-orient the American people to the values of virtuous work and patriotism. 215 “The most significate new thrust was designed to combat the widely observed letdown in patriotic sentiment.” 216 In 1947, the President’s Commission on Higher Education reported that “one of America’s urgent needs today is a continual commitment to the principles of democracy” and that “we cannot be so sure that the future of the democratic way of life is secure.” The Commission proposed an educational curricula for the public schools that would infuse every student with a “zeal for democracy” and instill “a fuller realization of democracy in every phase of living.“ The campaign was promoted both in public and private sector workplaces. During the war, the government had adopted the criteria of “loyalty” as a condition of federal employment. After the war, the House Un-American Activities Committee stepped up its investigations of government officials looking to hound out of their jobs suspected communists and subversives. Hundreds of 215

Freeland, R. The Truman Doctrine and the Origins of McCarthyism (1970) pp, 227-28.

216 Id at 230

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employees were blacklisted and literally blackmailed for their political views and even their sexual preference. The Truman administration was forced to launch its own loyalty program, requiring oaths and background checks as a condition of continued employment. 217 In the private sector, the National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce saw free enterprise imperiled by communist subversion of labor unions. A campaign was initiated to educate workers on the virtues of remaining union-free in a capitalist society. The Advisory Council produced thousands of posters hung in workplaces throughout the country extolling the benefits of the free enterprise system and millions of radio spots were broadcast promoting patriotism. 218 Mills, the sociologist, missed what was perhaps the main reasons why post-war Americans were not amendable to calls for a working class consciousness. They had known poverty and preferred economic security, however stultifying. And they were also conditioned to believe that worker solidarity was vaguely unpatriotic.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the full force of the state and federal governments and the laws were deployed to quell the civil resistance and social unrest caused by striking workers. But in post-World War II America, it was sustained public relations, full employment and mass affluence that ultimately crashed the Marxist dream of working class liberation in the United States. To be sure, race discrimination remained virulent in America, but Marxism 217

Part of this attack was motivated by hatred for the New Deal and the initiatives taken by the Roosevelt and Truman administrations to racially desegregate the civil service and the military.

218 Saval, N. Cubed (2014) at p. 163.

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had no plan for eradicating racism other than the class struggle bromide of white intellectuals, which most working class Blacks rejected as unresponsive. 219 Indeed, one of the primary objectives of the civil rights movement was equal employment opportunity and the imperatives of the Cold War moved the federal government to accept responsibility for civil rights enforcement.

As illustrated. much of the constitutional law during the fifty years from the end of the Civil War to the Great Depression was deeply reactionary and was influenced by the economic, social and racial policies of the time. The courts impeded the political progress needed to cope with dramatic social and economic change, both domestically and globally. But even as New Deal economic legislation was eventually upheld, it would take many more years to overrule "separate but equal" with the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decided in 1954, midway through the American Century. By then a more sensitive federal government explained that "it is in the context of the present world struggle between freedom and tyranny that the problem of racial discrimination must be viewed . . . Racial discrimination furnishes grist for the Communist propaganda mills, and it raises doubts even among friendly nations as to the intensity of our devotion to the democratic faith." The whole world was watching and the Supreme Court was prepared to accommodate a new meaning of equality, no less absolute, but much more inclusive. Building on the federal government's power to regulate the national economy, it was willing to expand that power further to uphold civil rights legislation. In 1964 in 219

On the other hand, many Black intellectuals, including Ralph Ellison and Langston Hughes, and civil rights leaders such as Paul Robeson, were enthusiastic socialists, Robeson having his passport revoked for visiting the Soviet Union.

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Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States, the Court held that the same constitutional authority which enabled the federal government to enact and enforce wage and hour laws permitted it to mandate equal access to places of public accommodation. Four years later, in Jones v. Mayer Co. the Court upheld the Fair Housing Act which prohibited racial discrimination in private housing transactions. By then, no one doubted the validity of a federal law that prohibited employment discrimination but in 1975 the Court once again confirmed its constitutionality in Johnson v. Railway Express Agency.

In 1968, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. famously asserted the dignity of all work – work done by farm workers, grocers, delivery drivers, caregivers, nursing assistants – that is essential to society’s health and wellbeing. “One day,” Dr. King told sanitation workers on strike in Memphis, “our society will come to respect the sanitation worker if it is to survive, for the person who picks up our garbage, in the final analysis, is as significant as the physician, for if he doesn’t do his job, diseases are rampant.

All labor has dignity.” And as we reflect on the 1963 march where Dr. King orated his I Have a Dream speech, it would do us well to note that the march on Washington was organized for Jobs and Justice - securing productive work as an inalienable right for the worker.

Four years before, at the Atlantic City convention, King urged the Democratic Party to adopt an “Economic Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged” which would tackle unemployment, poor housing, and a substandard education system. To him, the key measure to address poverty was less job training than job creation and a job guarantee.

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In 1966, A. Philip Randolph publicly presented a “Freedom Budget” whose proclaimed goal was to eradicate unemployment and poverty within ten years, with a set of federal policies worth $180 billion over the decade. Pointing out that 34 million Americans were living in poverty in a time of “unparalleled prosperity”, the budget provided seven objectives: 1. To provide full employment for all who are willing and able to work, including those who need education or training to make them willing and able.

2. To assure decent and adequate wages to all who work.

3. To assure a decent living standard to those who cannot or should not work.

4. To wipe out slum ghettos and provide decent homes for all Americans.

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5. To provide decent medical care and adequate educational opportunities to all Americans, at a cost they can afford.

6. To purify our air and water and develop our transportation and natural resources on a scale suitable to our growing needs.

7. To unite sustained full employment with sustained full production and high economic growth. 220 King and Randolph were reaching back to Roosevelt’s Economic Bill of Rights. They envisioned a secular and sacred community of people with useful and dignified work being at the core of their happiness. This socio-economic view, the promise of human progress, the beloved community, helped give birth to a new field of psychological research, the study of human motivation. As we have seen, psychoanalysis has been engrossed in the study of pathology and psychoanalysts such as Freud gave little thought to the sources of happiness, as opposed to the roots of unhappiness.

One of the earliest psychologists to focus attention on happy individuals and their psychological trajectory was Abraham Maslow, who is most well-known for positing a "hierarchy of needs." 221

220

Laurent. S. The Unknown Story of a Counter War on Poverty (2015) https://inequality.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/media/_media/wor king_papers/laurent_king-war-on-poverty.pdf 221 Maslow, A, H. A Theory of Human Emotion. Psychological Review (1943).

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4. Work and Belonging Inspired by the work of Erich Fromm, Maslow insists that the urge for self-actualization is deeply entrenched in the human psyche, but only surfaces once the more basic needs are fulfilled. Once the powerful needs for food, security, love and self-esteem are satisfied, a deep desire for creative expression and self-actualization rises to the surface. 222 The social needs on the third level of Maslow’s hierarchy relate to human interaction and the sense of belonging at work, bonding with co-workers, membership in social a union, club, or group of hobbyists.

The higher needs, beginning with esteem, are ego-driven needs. The primary elements of esteem are self-respect - the belief that you are valuable and deserving of dignity - and self-esteem - confidence in your potential for personal growth and accomplishments. Maslow specifically notes that self-esteem can be broken into two types: esteem which is based on respect and acknowledgment from others, and esteem which is based on your own self-assessment. Selfconfidence and independence stem from this latter type of self-esteem.

Finally, self-actualization describes the fulfillment of the potential as a person. Sometimes called self-fulfillment needs, self-actualization needs occupy the highest spot on Maslow's pyramid. Self-actualization needs include education, skill development, the refining of talents, caring for others, and broader learning goals. Like Freud and Fromm, all social scientists, Maslow is a product of his time, place and culture and his theory of motivation cannot be said to be universal, as it reflects Western, middle class, capitalist 222

Maslow, A.H. Motivation and Personality (1954)

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views. Yet, at least for this writer, the continued resonance of Maslow's theory in popular imagination, however unscientific it may seem, is possibly the single most telling evidence of its significance. We can immediately recognize it in themselves and others.

Perhaps more than love, devotion and freedom, as social beings, we crave work for a sense of belonging, to be an equal member of a working community in order to achieve basic acceptance, a sense of being needed, social and emotional support, and opportunities to increase self-esteem and confidence. This is what we call dignity. At last, a need that can be fulfilled almost entirely by work. But to what end?

King, Randolph and the many advocates for full employment opportunity knew that a job was a critical and necessary social ingredient to achieve equality and dignity in American life. They wanted all citizens, Black and white, to have the same economic opportunities to achieve the American Dream, which included the opportunity to perform productive work. It was affluence and opportunity, or at least the promise of both, that created the revolution that liberated 187 | P a g e

the masses, as crass and vulgar as mass culture could be.

Indeed, it was this same affluence that gave us the luxury of the formidable criticism that was directed against it. In short, having a job with the hope of improvement was enough for the great mass of working Americans. Lincoln knew what he was talking about and knew what he was fighting for: the system proved to be “just and generous, [a] prosperous system which opens the way to all – gives hope to all, and energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all.�

The paycheck was a ticket to a fuller and richer life and while the work could be boring and routine, a whole life could be made better outside the job itself through child-rearing, community engagement, recreation, church and learning.

The purpose of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is to ensure that employers are not motivated by prejudice when making employment decisions. It also requires the elimination of artificial, arbitrary and unnecessary barriers to employment that discriminate because of race, color, religion, sex and national origin. It empowers individuals to file a charge to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and when that remedy is exhausted, to file a civil complaint in the federal court.

Consider the change in substance in President Lyndon Johnson's public remarks at the time he signed the Civil Rights Act. When initially describing the intent of the law he stated that "it does not give special treatment to any citizen." However, within a year of this statement violence against civil rights activists did not abate and a wave of terrorist acts and murder shocked the world. At that moment, the gradual civil rights policy gave way to a more active, outcome-oriented policy. Responding to mounting political pressure, the president concluded: "To this end, equal 188 | P a g e

opportunity is essential but not enough, not enough . . . We must go beyond opportunity to achievement [of outcomes]."

In 1965, Johnson issued Executive Order 11246, which expanded a previous Executive Order issued by President Roosevelt in 1941. The purpose of the order was to prohibit racial, religious, gender and national origin discrimination by employers that provide goods and services under a contract with the federal government. The Order also required affirmative action to ensure that employment decisions are made without regard to race, religion, sex or national origin.

In 1965, Black unemployment was 11 percent, while for whites the figure was 5 percent. Whereas a white family earned on average about $6,500 a year, a Black family earned $3,500. Affirmative action was one of the federal government’s attempts to narrow the employment and income gaps between races. By 1972, little progress had been made. Unemployment stood at 9.4 percent for Blacks and 4.6 percent for whites. By 1995, after 30 years of affirmative action, unemployment among Black stood at 11.3 percent, for whites 4.8 percent. Family income for Black Americans was $19,533, for whites $32,960. In 2004, median family income of Blacks ages 30 to 39 was only 58 percent that of white families. In 2018, the medium household income for Blacks was $61,937, $89,632 for whites.

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Critics claim that affirmative action has failed because Black unemployment has remained consistently twice that of whites and black family income has remained consistently half that of whites.

Adapting the social Darwinist framework, some controversial studies have even concluded that affirmative action has no purpose because minorities have inferior mental capacities. But the apparent reason that affirmative action has not substantially narrowed the employment and income gaps is because it does not address one of the main root problems: unequal educational opportunity. Even opponents of affirmative action concede that the economic gap between Blacks and whites has nothing to do with pseudo-scientific of the inferior mental capacities of minorities. The economic gap is the direct result of the persistent problem of inferior schooling. In short, the debate over affirmative action will arguably less relevant if the U.S. educational system can be reformed to compete with global standards. That means a national 190 | P a g e

priority to achieve a world-class educational system that is open to every child, a monumental challenge presently obscured by racial politics.

But even with affirmative action, it was apparent that structural changes in the post-War economy driven mostly by automation and the relocation of industries to “right-towork” states in the South continued to exert a powerful gravitational pull downward on unskilled and uneducated workers. “Modern industry was just too technologically efficient to rely upon large numbers of unskilled laborers, regardless of economic conditions. This fact of business life suggested that, without the creation of large numbers of new jobs at good wages, federal equal opportunity legislation would have only a limited impact upon the changes of many Blacks.” 223 A few decades later, with the end of the Cold War, and an increasingly globalized economy, unskilled, uneducated whites would also be left behind. Real hourly wages for most workers have risen only one percent since 1979 to 2006, even as those workers’ productivity has increased 60 percent. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the median American family made $58,407 in 2006. That’s $991 less, adjusted for inflation, than the median in 2000. At the same time, corporate profits have skyrocketed, ironically reaffirming classic eighteen-century economic dogma for the “new” economy. As observed long ago by the classical philosopher David Ricardo: “There is no way of keeping profits up but by keeping wages down.” 224 Labor unions, of course, have been the counterweight to declining wages and job insecurity. Membership in labor unions peaked in 1955, with about a third of the entire 223 224

Jones, J. American Work (1998) p. 366.

On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817)

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workforce belonging to a union. Not coincidentally, the number of manufacturing jobs reached its zenith that year and the income gap was the narrowest in U.S. history. 225 As early as 1939, the Special Committee on Un-American Activities formed in the U.S. House of Representatives investigated alleged communist infiltration in labor unions and government agencies. The Committee was the first to take full advantage of the subpoena power and to issue contempt citations, establishing a precedent of threats, intimidation, denunciation and black-listing employed by congressional committees for decades to come. Dominated by segregationists, the Committee defunded the acclaimed Federal Theater Project, claiming its productions were supporting racial integration between Black and white Americans, while also perpetuating a communist agenda.

But it was not the many investigations into communist and racketeering ties to organized labor that lead to the ultimate demise of industrial unions; rather, it was the steady decline of manufacturing jobs that started in the nineteen seventies.

The end of the Cold War triggered a massive restructuring of the U.S. economy to take advantage of newly opened global opportunities.

America lost 5.7 million manufacturing jobs, or one-third of the manufacturing workforce, in the first decade of the twenty first century alone. That rate was the worst in history, even worse than in the nineteen eighties when Newsweek warned of the worst loss of manufacturing jobs since the Great Depression. The

225

The Rise of US Income Inequality and the Demise of the Manufacturing Industries (2015) https://www.industryweek.com/theeconomy/competitiveness/article/21966040/the-rise-of-us-incomeinequality-and-the-demise-of-the-manufacturing-industries

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hollowing out of the manufacturing sector, which historically was heavily unionized, caused the decline of unions as well. Moreover, many employees began to believe that unions had become unnecessary because laws and government agencies took more responsibility for worker safety and paycheck protection. Employers offered health and retirement savings benefits, subsidized by tax deductions, and comparable wages to remain union-free and to make the case that workers were better off without paying union dues.

Deregulation, the purpose of which was to open up more domestic and global opportunities, also took a toll on union membership. Perhaps the restructuring of AT&T in the waning days of the twentieth century demonstrates the most dramatic example of this new corporate-induced reality. In January 1996, anticipating the enactment of the Telecommunications Act later that year, the New Jerseybased telecommunications giant stunned the nation when it announced a reorganization plan accompanied by the elimination of 40,000 jobs in three years. Later the company issued an internal memorandum to its employees, explaining “the reality of today’s marketplace demands that we must be able to respond swiftly to market growth opportunities and relentless competitive pressures. If we are to win in the marketplace the company must become a more efficient, effective and profitable business… As a result, we will introduce an involuntary workforce management program in selected organizations.”

AT&T’s announcement of its “involuntary workforce management program” caused the price of its stock to soar.

By the end of 1996, the company announced $75.53 billion in earnings. A restructuring of this size was unusually since workers were generally laid off during slow economic times, 193 | P a g e

not during big earnings years. However, according to Fortune Magazine, the old rules were inapplicable as “the companies of the Fortune 500 have reconstructed, reengineered, refinanced, downsized, laid off, split up, and merged their way to prosperity.” By June of that year, the Personnel Journal speculated on what many American employees were feeling: that the biggest contributor to downsizing was the growing pressure on corporations to net increasingly larger stockholder returns, at any expense. The top ten American corporations earned almost a trillion dollars in 1996, a year when tens of thousands of jobs were eliminated permanently.

AT&T’s vice president of human resources codified management’s thinking on this “new deal” for American workers. Instead of the employer-employee relationship being based on an exchange of loyalty for security, the executive explained that employees would have to prepare themselves to move from job to job. Instead of “living in the past” and concentrating on lost jobs, she explained that employees should train themselves to offer the best skills so that employers could hire and retain the “very best workers.”

In the new economy she declared, “all workers were contingent.”

The federal labor law framework permits labor unions to counter employer power so that bargaining can take place, more or less between equals. In practice, collective bargaining has become a zero-sum game —one parties’ gain is another parties’ loss. Locked in endless power struggles, often exacerbated by inflammatory class-war rhetoric, the law’s most devout adherents have presided over the deindustrialization of America. When economic forces required cooperation between management and labor to maintain the skill level of the workforce or to save a facility 194 | P a g e

from closing or leaving the country, the doctrinaire defenders of the faith continued to act like macho gladiators.

Tenured professors with nothing to lose were also prime offenders, as they continued to provide an endless stream of class conscious politics disguised as scholarship. The result of this fruitless and endless struggle has been the loss of millions of manufacturing jobs during the last quarter of the twentieth century. At the same time, management has learned to produce more with less. Manufacturing GDP remains about 14 percent, but this percentage has been maintained over the last two decades with about one third less manpower.

With labor’s limited ability to influence corporate behavior, in some industries the strike remains a last resort weapon, if only to remind the consuming public that management and labor are still capable of mutually assured destruction.

However, these struggles have not had much impact on the public mind, to the frustration of union leaders who feel, perhaps justifiably, that they are fighting the battle for all producers. In 1997, over one hundred and eighty five thousand members of the teamsters’ Union walked off their jobs at United Parcel Service of America (UPS) in a dispute over higher wages and pension benefits. The union added demands to cover part-time employees and to create more full time jobs. Strategically, the union positioned the strike, which inconvenienced the public, as standing up for exploited part-timers, a position that resonated widely with the public. Poll after poll taken during the strike revealed a deep anxiety over job security and a widespread belief that the economic expansion was not being shared equitably with the workforce.

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The fifteen-day strike settled with a public relations windfall for the union and a settlement that required UPS to create two thousand additional full time jobs. However, almost a year to the day that the settlement was reached, UPS repudiated that part of the agreement which required it to create the new jobs. Optimism about the strike revitalizing the labor movement quickly faded.

In 1998, nine thousand members of the United Auto Workers (UAW) walked off their jobs at two General Motors stamping plants purportedly in protest of health and safety conditions. But below the surface, the struggle pitted General Motor’s competitive drive to cut costs against the union’s efforts to save jobs. National labor leaders argued that there was no need for GM, a company that was operating in the red, to relocate manufacturing facilities abroad. The company argued that under the Wagner Act, making investments in plants abroad was not a subject of mandatory bargaining. The stamping plants were strategically chosen by the union because of the vital role they played in GM’s word wide production operations. It was thought that a crippling strike would end quickly, well in time for the UAW’s annual convention in Hawaii. The strike lingered for weeks and affected tens of thousands of workers nationwide, as assembly plants and suppliers closed. In the end, the parties reached a stalemate, costing the workers a billion dollars in wages and the company two billion dollars in lost profits. According to the UAW president, “nobody really won. We had to strike over what we had already negotiated for.”

By 2000, the UAW was beginning to acquiesce to the evitable, that a two-tiered wage scale was necessary to keep domestic industry viable. In 2006, Big Three automakers 196 | P a g e

reached deals with the UAW that would let them hire a group of workers that receive lower pay and benefits. Auto suppliers had negotiated similar plans. Once the bastion of high paying jobs, manufacturing has succumbed to the pressure of global competition, as the federal labor law has not been readily adaptable to the new economy. For example, unions have not had much success in recruiting workers in the service industries. Also, contracting and project work has made it difficult to identify a bargaining unit, which is a legal prerequisite to forming a union.

The inability to provide job security or mobility and the acquiescence to lower wages, has left labor unions with little value in exchange for union dues. At the same time, corporations, labor unions and other groups spend tens of millions of dollars annually to influence legislation. Enabled by the U.S. Supreme Court in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission, decided in 2010, corporations, unions and advocacy groups can anonymously give unlimited amounts of money to buy access to state and federal governments.

Organized labor aggressively promoted the Employee Free Choice Act, which would have permitted employees to more easily organize labor unions.

Under current federal law, unions must win elections to become legally recognized as a bargaining unit. While labor unions lost much of the time, many believed that the results were skewed by the flagrant intimidation engaged in by employers. According to its proponents, the Employee Free Choice Act would have levelled the playing field by making elections unnecessary if the union could demonstrate that fifty-one percent of the identified bargaining unit agreed by signing a card to be represented by the union. A strong believer in union membership, Barack Obama emerged to play his part.

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While the Affordable Care Act – Obamacare – unleashed a political backlash that stayed in the news cycle for more than a year, but it was the Employee Free Choice Act that business and industry feared more. Tens of millions of dollars were spent on an all-out effort to defeat the bill in the U.S. Senate. The Employee Free Choice Act, more than any other single domestic initiative by the Obama administration, re-ignited the class warfare between capital and labor thought to be long-settled, and that reawakened the near paranoid distrust of the federal government thought to be safely dormant. The pro-union initiative also generated a political and financial windfall for Republican candidates nationwide who were all too willing to tap the anger and resentment triggered by the financial panic of 2008 and the grueling recession that followed. All the shibboleths about free markets, frugality, prudent risk and self-reliance seem to tumble with the stock market. Americans were left unmoored and unstable and looking for someone to blame.

In 2010, Scott Walker, a Republican won his first term as governor of Wisconsin. Before his inauguration, he began stoking resentment of public sector unions. 226 Soon he signed a law that curtailed collective bargaining rights for public employees and reduced health insurance and pension benefits. The law prompted a recall petition and a rancorous recall election that Walker won. He was reelected two years later on an aggressively “right to work” platform. Similarly, in 2012, the Michigan Freedom Fund, funded by billionaire industrials David and Charles Koch, was formed to lobby for legislation that curbed collective bargaining in the private sector. Governor Rick Snyder, a Republican, signed the bill.

In 2018, the Supreme Court invalidated an Illinois law requiring public sector employees to pay agency fees even if they disagreed with the union’s political positions, holding 226

Cramer, K. The politics of Resentment (2017).

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that the assessment of such fees violated the First Amendment. 227 Anticipating a significant reduction in membership and revenue, unions throughout the country have reacted by attempting to restrict the ruling’s effects.

Bloomberg has reported that public sector unions are losing tens of thousands of agency fee payers. 228 As for the private sector, when the UWA tried to organize a Volkswagen facility in Chattanooga. Tennessee in , millions of dollars flooded the state to defeat the drive. Playing on the UAW’s financial contributions to the Obama election campaign, billboards labelled the UAW, the “United Obama Workers.” When Volkswagen’s management took a neutral position, Republican Governor Bill Lee threatened to withhold tax abatements and worker training grants. The UWA lost the election in 2014 and again in 2019. To a remarkable extent, the level of income inequality corresponds with the decline of private sector unions, which in 2019 stood at 6.2 percent of the private sector workforce.

According to economists Thomas Piketty and Emanuel Saez, 75 percent of all income gains from 2002 to 2006 went to the top one percent of households making $382,600 per year or more. While some economists suggest that wages are an inaccurate measurement of income because they do not 227

Janus v. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) 228

Mass Exodus of Public Union Fee Payers After High Court Ruling, April 5, 2019 https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-laborreport/mass-exodus-of-public-union-fee-payers-after-high-courtruling

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account for the value of employment-based fringe benefits and refundable tax credits, the sustained decline in the number of U.S. taxpayers clearly reflect stagnating overall incomes. In 2008 57 million working Americans paid no federal income taxes according to the Tax Policy Center, an increase of 20 percent since 1984. No doubt, the combined impacts of trade policies, illegal immigration and welfare reform account for the fact that only 62 percent of households paid federal income taxes in 2008. But a sizable percentage of these households have also seen their incomes flatten during the first decade of the twentieth century. 229 As corporate profits and executive compensation have soared and most of the wealth has concentrated at the top among the top earners, government spending has increased to prop up the purchasing power of the average American working for ever diminishing wages. From 1070 to 2005, the U.S. economy grew by nearly 400 percent, from a $3.5 trillion to a nearly a $14 trillion economy. Due to investments in labor saving technology, per capita GDP nearly doubled but incredibly per capita income stayed flat.

While medium income increased by 32 percent during this 229

In the last decade of the twentieth century, President Bill Clinton advocated the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and other trade agreements, convinced that free trade was a prerequisite for American prosperity. The export of blue-collar factory jobs was inevitable but in a race-baiting maneuver, welfare for women and dependent children was also reformed, which required welfare recipients to eventually find work. As production jobs were outsourced requiring dislocated workers to find lower paying jobs in the service economy, their resentment and anger were quelled somewhat with the thought that at least the “welfare queens� and other dead beats were forced to find and hold a job, regardless of how low paying the job might be. In short, both men and women, Black and white, provided an enormous pool of cheap labor for employers.

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time, this was primarily because women entered the workforce to bring in extra income. At the same time, after tax income of top earners tripled. In other words, the massive wealth created by increased productivity over the last thirty years or so has gone in large measure to top income earners.

Responding to this mass inequality, federal government spending increased by 221 percent. By 2010, more Americans worked in government jobs than in manufacturing. Almost one in two Americans lived in a household were someone received government benefits, primarily a social security, disability Medicare or unemployment payment. Still, by 2008 the poverty rate reached 15 percent, or 45 million Americans. With one in seven Americans living at or below the federal poverty level, with the biggest increases in poverty in America’s suburbs, nearly 18 million American families experienced food shortages in 2008, more than any time since before the food stamp program was created in 1964. In 2020, in response to the pandemic-induced recession, the federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, which distributed more than half a trillion dollars in direct aid to more than 150 million Americans, from stimulus checks $1,200 per adult and $500 per child for households below a certain income threshold - to $600 per week in additional unemployment benefits actually doubled the lost pay for the lowest income workers. During the pandemic, many low wage workers decided that they were financially better off receiving enhanced unemployment compensation than getting a paycheck. Acting in the short-term, many workers asked their employers to be lay them off because many made more money getting an unemployment check than they did working a low wage job. Prior to the CARES Act, at least

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one study warned that poverty could reach the highest level in the half-century for which there is data. 230 Social alienation, chronic unemployment and underemployment, and family breakdown of Black Americans has always been relegated to being a sociological problem. For example, the Kerner Commission report in 1967 which declared that “our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white - separate and unequal,” called for expanded aid to Black communities in order to prevent further racial violence and polarization. Unless drastic and costly remedies were undertaken at once, the report said, there would be a “continuing polarization of the American community and, ultimately, the destruction of basic democratic values.” The report identified more than 150 uprisings or major disorders between 1965 and blamed “white racism” for sparking the violence, not a conspiracy

by Black political groups as some claimed. The Commission argued, among other things, that the great influx of cheap immigrant labor in the nineteenth century occurred when industry was creating more unskilled jobs more quickly than could be filled. Black workers, particularly in the northern cities were losing their jobs due to automation and the relocation of industry to southern right to work states. The result was oppressive poverty and smoldering resentment.

The result was mass incarnation. But when these problems became part of the white American experience, it signaled a breakdown in the social and economic fabric and a threat to democracy itself. For many white people who have become

230

NY Times, June 2, 2020 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/21/us/politics/coronaviruspoverty.html

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obsolete in the “new economy” marriage, industriousness, community and faith have all but collapsed. 231 Social belonging is a fundamental human need. And when people are isolated and disconnected and without work for prolonged periods of time, they can become dysfunctional with increases in mental disorders, suicide, drug addiction, alcoholism and “deaths of despair.” 232 This pathology is particularly acute for those who have been historically marginalized and disenfranchised. And even as the vast majority of the jobless poor, of all colors and backgrounds, may sincerely respect the values of work and personal initiative, lack of suitable work has left them without the spiritual and financial anchor of respectable employment. 233 The research into adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) sheds light into how work can help stabilize and reorient a life. ACEs are stressful or traumatic experiences, including abuse, neglect and a range of household dysfunction which Dr. Robert Anda, of he Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has described as a “chronic public health disaster.” 234 According to the CDC preventing ACEs could 231

Murray, C. Coming Apart (2012).

Case, A. & Deaton, A . Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (2020). See also Brody, J. Personal Health: Consequences and Damages of Unemployment, The New York Times (Nov. 3, 1982) https://www.nytimes.com/1982/11/03/garden/personal-healthunemployment-consequences-and-damages.html 232

233

Wilson, W.J. When Work Disappears (1996).

234

https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/aces/index.html?CDC_AA _refVal=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cdc.gov%2Fviolenceprevention%2Face study%2Findex.html

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potentially reduce a large number of health conditions. For example, up to 1.9 million cases of heart disease and 21 million cases of depression could have been potentially avoided by preventing ACEs. Researchers and practitioners advocate for protective systems to help foster resilience.

These systems are Capabilities, Attachment and Belonging, Community and Spirituality.

The research seems to validate other models of human development, including those of Erik Erikson, Jean Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg and Abraham Maslow. While focused on different components of human development — psycho/social, moral, spiritual, and cognitive — at the core of each of these approaches is an assumption of the biological imperative for growth and development. The necessary skills to achieve optimal development are problem-solving - planning, help-seeking, critical and creative thinking; autonomy - a sense of identity, selfefficacy, self-awareness, task-mastery; and a sense of purpose and belief in the future - goal direction, educational aspirations, optimism, faith, and spiritual connectedness. It would appear, therefore, having meaningful and productive work creates socially competent people who have a sense of their own identity and efficacy, who are able to make decisions, set goals, and believe in their future. Work, then, meets the basic human needs for caring, connectedness, respect, challenge, power, and meaning.

Consequently, joblessness is associated with some serious illnesses, although the causal links are poorly understood.

Studies have found strong links between unemployment and cancer, with unemployed men facing a twenty-five percent higher risk of dying of the disease. The physical and

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psychological consequences of unemployment are significant enough to affect family members. The economists Kerwin Charles and Melvin Stephens found an eighteen percent increase in the probability of divorce following a husband’s job loss and thirteen percent after a wife’s. Unemployment of parents also has a negative impact on achievement of their children. 235 Social alienation was famously described by French sociologist Émile Durkheim in the late nineteenth century with his concept of anomie. Durkheim focused on social solidarity as one of the important functions of a social order: individuals had a defined place in their society that was created and reinforced by the social values of morality, religion, and patriotism. Stable employment is a primary means of forming a social identity. When there is a breakdown of social bonds between an individual and his or her community ties, a fragmentation of social identity can occur According to Durkheim, when one is caught in a normless state in society, one has no anchors to hold on to and, accordingly, cannot situate oneself within that society, and so becomes socially adrift and isolated. He noted that anomie is common during periods of social transformation.

Certainly, we have witnessed during the last decades of the twentieth century dramatic social, economic and technological change with many Americans being set adrift from steady employment. In 1950, fourteen percent of men were out of the labor force. Today, that figure stands at thirty one percent. The share of prime-age Americans - 25 to 54 years old - who are working has been trending down since 235

Baker, D. & Hasset, K. The Human Disaster of Unemployment. The New York Times (May 12, 2012) https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/opinion/sunday/the-humandisaster-of-unemployment.html

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2000. Among men, the decline began even earlier: the share of prime-age men who are neither working nor looking for work has doubled since the late 1970s. Schooling and retirement explain part of the decline. education but Economists who study rising inequality attribute a large share of it to skill-biased technological change — the tendency for advances in technology to enhance the productivity and wages of workers who have certain skills while reducing the demand for those who don’t. Unskilled workers are left with the choice of accepting lower wages or leaving the labor force. This hypothesis is consistent with the fact that labor force participation has fallen more for workers with lower educational attainment. 236 There are currently 29 million teenagers in America and this segment is growing at twice the rate of the overall population. The educational status quo is graduating millions students who are ill prepared for a changing economy. In fact, a report issued by a group of retired generals and admirals states that 75 percent of young Americans between the ages of 17 and 24 are unable to enlist in the military due to poor education, criminal records, drug use, obesity and other disqualifications. At the same time, one American is turning 50 years of age every 7.5 seconds and millions of current workers are retiring. The current education system dates back to the Industrial Revolution. At the time, America needed to prepare displaced agricultural workers for factory jobs and to assimilate millions of immigrants. The schoolhouse, like the factory, was 236

NY Times 6/15/18 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/business/menunemployment-jobs.amp.html

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organized around mass production standards. This education system was efficient and measurable, and it churned out students who were ready to face the demands of the nation's then new industrial economy. But today teaching by rote and following rigid academic agendas is inimical in the emerging knowledge-based economy.

Jobs requiring manual labor and little ingenuity have been outsourced to countries where laborers make less money than their American counterparts. In theory, outsourcing should create new wealth for Americans. American firms outsource to leverage the skills of workers that produce goods and services more efficiently than the firms could otherwise produce, freeing them up to produce goods and services that it could not otherwise afford, such as products embedded with a high degree of knowledge. However, most Americans do not seem well suited to compete in the knowledge economy, where science, technological and cultural literacy may make the critical difference between success and failure. A 2006 National Science Foundation survey found that as many as 25 percent of Americans did not know the earth goes around the sun. Only a third could name the three branches of government. According to a study on adult literacy sponsored by the U.S. Department of Labor, upwards of 90 million Americans are so poorly educated that they cannot even write a brief letter explaining an error on a credit card, figure out a bus schedule, or use a calculator to figure out the difference between a sale and a regular price. According to the report, one out of every three adults in the United States is functionally, marginally, or completely illiterate. More than 20 million Americans are unable to read or have less than a fifth-grade ready level. An additional 35 million have less than a ninth-grade reading

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level. Not surprisingly, half of the people with low literacy rates live in poverty.

Illiteracy rates are actually increasing in America. In 1995, 90 million Americans were functionally illiterate. By 2003, the number jumped to 92 million, or an astounding 48 percent of the adult population. This is partially due to the high dropout rates among Hispanic and African American students, which are nearly double that of white students, and the fact that over a third of all immigrants arriving in the United States since 2000 do not have a high school diploma.

Even among the students who graduate high school, less than a third are proficient in basic reading and math, according to the Alliance for Excellent Education. These dismal outcomes are at least partially responsible for the widening wage gap in America. As noted, from 2000 to 2006, as GDP, adjusted for inflation, expanded by 8.4 percent per person, wages for the average worker with a high school diploma went down 3 percent. In 2006, the household income earned by the lowest 20 percent of households stood at 3.6 percent of total household income. The top 5 percent earned 100 times that amount. At the bottom of the workforce, the United States has many more unskilled and workers than in any other developed economy. In this regard, America resembles India more than Germany. Although the numbers are much greater due to India’s enormous population, unskilled labor in India serves the needs of the middle class as domestic servants; include landscapers and it is the same in the U.S. As observed by Jefferson less than a generation after the founding the country, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.� 237 237

Osnos, E. The Violent Style. The New Yorker, Nov. 16, 2020.

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As major parts of the world develop and become richer, Americans are faced with increasing competition from workers in other countries. Maintaining living standards in the United States is becoming harder. If the slow, stupid or impulsive are left without meaningful work, so be it; or as Michael Kinsley has noted: “The computer revolution has bred a generation of smart loners, many of them rich and some of them complacently Darwinian, convinced that they don’t need society - nor should anyone else.”

Two decades of polling by the Pew Research Center may give credence to Kinsley’s generalization. On question asked annually is whether “government should care for those who can’t care for themselves.” In 1987, 71 percent of American’s agreed; in 2007, only 69 percent agreed. While a significant majority believes that government has a responsibility to those who cannot care for themselves, the acceleration of global forces and their impact on the security of the average American appears to be influencing how much compassion Americans are willing to extend to those who place a demand on social and economic resources. The struggle over scare jobs has strained social bonds and while most people do not want government entitlements reduced or curtailed, it appears that they may be willing to entertain the possibility of goring the millionaire next door.

For white Americans between 45 and 54, average life expectancy was no longer increasing; in fact, it was actually declining — in a pattern seen almost nowhere else on Earth.

This decline has come almost entirely among white Americans without a four-year college degree, who make up 38 percent of the U.S. working-age population. Something is making life worse, especially for less educated white males, and it is probably because their work-life skills are 209 | P a g e

too obsolete to hold a steady, good paying job in a higher skilled economy. In 1995, ninety million Americans were functionally illiterate. By 2003, most likely due to increased immigration of low wage workers, the number jumped to ninety-two million, or an astounding forty eight percent of the adult population; and lack of job stability makes it much more difficult to have stable families. They are socially disconnected. For white men, much of the decline stems from higher rates of suicide, opioid overdoses and alcoholrelated illnesses. At the same time, America’s prisons are bursting with disconnected, maladaptive and chronically unemployable people. By the turn of the twentieth century, America had the largest incarnation rate in the world with one in one 142 residents held in a jail. 238 America’s prisons are bursting with the chronically, and the permanently unemployable. One of the less recognized toxic byproducts of the deindustrialization of America (as measured by manufacturing jobs not productivity) is the fact that U.S. has the largest incarceration rate in the world.

According to the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, America's prison population topped two million inmates for the first time in history in 2002. The fifty states, the District of Columbia and the federal government held 1,355,748 prisoners (two-thirds of the total incarcerated population), and local municipal and county jails held 665,475 inmates. By 2002, America's jails held 1 in every 142 U.S. residents. Males were incarcerated at the rate of 1,309 inmates per 100,000 U.S. men, while the female 238

Sarno, J pp 17-19. Jail makes up such a big subculture in America that it ranks its own genre of reality television

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incarceration rate was 113 per 100,000 women residents. Of the 1,200,203 state prisoners, 3,055 were younger than 18 years old. In addition, adult jails held 7,248 inmates under 18. Two-thirds of prisoners released annually are rearrested, according to the U.S. Justice Department. 239 The number of additional jail inmates grows faster than the number of new jail beds. States spent $29.5 billion for prisons in 2001, about a $5.5 billion increase from 1996, after adjusting for inflation. Excluding capital spending, the average cost of operating State prisons in 2001 was $100 per U.S. resident, up from $90 in 1996. Correctional authorities spent $38.2 billion to maintain the nation's state correctional systems in fiscal year 2001, including $29.5 billion specifically for adult correctional facilities. Day-to-day operating expenses totaled $28.4 billion, and capital outlays for land, new building, and renovations, 1.1 billion. The average annual operating cost per State inmate in 2001 was $22,650, or $62.05 per day. Among facilities operated by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, it was $22,632 per inmate, or $62.01 per day. In America, the increase in cost of corrections outpaced the cost of health, education, or conserving natural resources. This investment seems to have no impact on lowering crime rates. Instead, this dramatic incarceration rate may be a manifestation of a shallow economy and deteriorating social structure. Also, as John Fabian Witt points out in American Contagions, the unprotected sex and illicit drug use have made prisons a breeding ground for HIV/AIDS infection, which then spreads into the communities upon the inmates’ release. At the time of this writing, the coronavirus has infected tens of thousands of prisoners, creating a dystopian quarantine with 239

Alexander, M. The New Jim Crow (2010).

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unforeseen consequences. The barbaric English Poor Laws of the nineteen century did no worse.

While government policies could be enacted to provide better incentives for lifelong learning and re-tooling, democratic institutions can only change when the people want to change, when the will of the people demands it.

Scarcely half of American children in the nation’s fifty largest cities will leave the public schools with a high school diploma in hand, according to America’s Promise Alliance.

U.S. law has guaranteed equal educational and employment opportunity regardless of race but these children are disproportionately African Americans. Their homes are disproportionately located in the nation’s largest school districts. More than half – 53 percent – of African American males drop out of high school compared with 22 percent of white males, unconscionable numbers regardless of race.

Millions of American children and young people every year are being deprived of the opportunity to compete in the twenty first century.

America has incarcerated a substantial part of an entire generation of working age African American men, an indelible badge of shame for any society that purports to advance opportunity for all its citizens. To fill the gap left by such a big absence of working age men, America has imported millions of undocumented workers from Mexico and Central America, many of whom are functionally illiterate. But having sacrificed so many young men to incarceration, the nation has put at risk every other young person in the country. Of those students who have earned a high school diploma, their prospects may not be that much better than their peers who have left school without a diploma. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, 46 percent of twelfth graders are 212 | P a g e

functioning below the “basic” level of proficiency in science, while only two percent have qualified as “advanced.” Between 1992 and 2005, twelfth-grade reading skills dropped dramatically. According to the NAEP report, only 24 percent of twelfth graders can compose organized, coherent prose in clear language with correct spelling and grammar.

In 2010, Andrew Cherlin and Bradford Wilcox have written about a generation that can’t move up the economic ladder not only because they are unprepared for the contemporary job market but also because they are disconnected to fundamental social institutions such as marriage and religion. “They’re becoming socially disengaged, floating away from the college-educated middle class,” they wrote.

They also asked the question whether this social disengagement would leave this cohort vulnerable to political appeals based on fear and anger.

Donald Trump’s political rise was based, in part, on his appeal among white, male voters who faced periods of unemployment and falling wages. Others followed because they feared their status was at risk or that they would be culturally displaced. 240 Democrats have historically won about 90 percent of the Black vote and more than 65 percent of the Latino vote. However, the 2020 presidential election, which saw the highest voter turnout in a century, continued a trend that started in the nineteen eighties based on education and income. Since the presidency of Ronald Reagan era, the two major American parties have essentially 240

NY Times April 24, 2018 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/24/us/politics/trump-economicanxiety.html

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traded their core supporters. Democrats, the party of union halls and working-class America, now include much of the nation’s professional class. Republicans, once the party of Americans with four-year college degrees, are increasingly the party of the white working class. 241 The growing divisions may explain why the nation’s political center is shrinking and the country is divided by class as much as by race.

In 1980, Republicans won 76 of the 100 counties with the largest share of residents holding a four-year or more advanced college degree. By 200, the parties were equally divided. However, in 2020, Republicans won only 16 of these counties, an enormous shift in forty years. Likewise, in 1980, Republicans won 91 of the 100 counties with he highest median incomes. By 2020, that number had been reduced to 43.

Certainly, Americans have long been divided culturally and politically by occupation, education and income. Laborers have been reviled as ignorant and worse. Educated elites have long been foils for populist politicians and political charlatans alike. Richard Hofstadler chronicled the antiintellectual strain in American society, describing it as “resentment of the life of the mind, and those who are considered to represent it; and a disposition to constantly

241

WSJ How the 2020 Election Deepened America’s WhiteCollar/Blue-Collar Split. Nov. 24, 2020 https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-the-2020-election-deepenedamericas-white-collar-blue-collar-split11606219208?mod=hp_lead_pos4

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minimize the value of that life.” 242 Also, he described the commonly shared view that "intellectuals , , , are pretentious, conceited . . . and snobbish; and very likely immoral, dangerous, and subversive . . . The plain sense of the common man is an altogether adequate substitute for, if not actually much superior to, formal knowledge and expertise."

243 The segregationist Governor of Alabama and presidential candidate tapped into both racism and anti-intellectualism, often deriding “pointy-head college professors who can’t even park a bicycle straight.” 244 Polls suggest that educated, higher income earners embrace diversity both at work and for the country as a whole. 245 In Who Are We? Samuel Huntington has worried that bilingualism, dual citizenship, religious diversity and multiculturalism risk undermining distinctly American ideals – including the creed that holds out the promise of freedom and opportunity. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. also has warned of the Balkanization of American society into ethnocentric conclaves. 246 At the same time, never in history have so many races, nationalities and cultures mixed 242 243

Hofstadler, R. Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963) 23 Id at 158

244

NY Times, George Wallace Tapped Into Racial Fear. Decades Later, Its Force Remains Potent. April 1, 2018 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/01/us/george-wallace-tappedinto-racial-fear-decades-later-its-force-remains-potent.html

245

N.Y. Times The Myth Cosmopolitanism (2016) https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/03/opinion/sunday/the-myth-ofcosmopolitanism.html 246

The Disuniting of America (1991).

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in the country and in the workplace. There was a sharp rise in the rate of intermarriage in the last decades of the twentieth century, as immigrants with temporary work visa marry U.S. citizens and gain citizenship status themselves.

In the U.S. according to a forecast by the Urban Institute, marriages between some combination of Black, Hispanic, white and Asian will triple to 21 percent of total weddings by 2050. To those who celebrate ethnic identity and cultural diversity, the idea of the large scale mixing of the races raises the specter of homogenization or of a generic culture.

Certainly, that is the tendency of transnational corporations that market brands across cultures.

Traditionally, the nation-state, and therefore nationality, is based on a contiguous territory, with a single or dominate language and shared traditions. But the nation-state itself is being drawn into the global economy, as Americans are ever more inter-dependent on the rest of the world, particularly since foreign money has fueled American consumption and therefore supported American living standards. This has caused a populist, nationalistic reaction which not only drives toxic, raced-based politics but has seeped into the overall culture, including the workplace.

However, it appears that most diversity training efforts at U.S. companies are ineffective and even counterproductive in increasing the number of women and minorities in managerial positions, according to an analysis that turned decades of conventional wisdom, government policy and court rulings on their head. A comprehensive review of 31 years of data from 830 mid-size to large U.S. workplaces found that the kind of diversity training exercises offered at most firms were followed by a 7.5 percent drop in the number of women in management. The number of Black 216 | P a g e

Americans and female managers fell by 10 percent, and the number of Black men in top positions fell by 12 percent.

Similar effects were seen for Latinos and Asians. Similarly, research from Boston Consulting Group found that around three quarters of employees in underrepresented groups women, racial and ethnic minorities, and LGBTQ employees—did not feel they’ve personally benefited from their companies’ diversity and inclusion programs. 247 The analysis did not find that all diversity training is useless.

Rather, it showed that mandatory programs, often undertaken to avoid liability in discrimination lawsuits, were the problem. When diversity training is voluntary and undertaken to advance a company's business goals, it was associated with increased diversity in management.

The new class of clerical and office jobs created by the first four decades of industrialization were off limits to most immigrants and Black Americans. Today, U.S. businesses spend from $200 million to $300 million a year on diversity training, but the new study is one of the first attempts to systematically analyze its impact. What the report found is that programs work best when they are voluntary and focus on specific organizational skills, such as establishing mentoring relationships and giving women and minorities a chance to prove their worth in high-profile roles.

When attendance is voluntary, diversity training might lead to an increase in managerial diversity. Most employers, however, force their managers and workers to go through training, and this is the least effective option in terms of 247

BCG Diversity by the Numbers (2019) https://www.bcg.com/capabilities/diversity-inclusion/genderdiversity-research-by-numbers

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increasing diversity. It appears that forcing people to go through training creates a backlash against diversity.

Much of the time, diversity training has been mischaracterized by many employers as a legal issue. And if they are doing it for legal protection, most employers really don't care whether the training takes hold. It is hardly surprising that when such training is not meant to be transformative it could have counterproductive effects, leaving employees feeling cynical and distrustful of the company and in the worst case, sowing the seeds for conflict between employees.

In her article The Knowledge Economy and Diversity: New Opportunity for Black Americans, Angela Larson has opined that “many Black Americans believe that Capitalism is evil” and that this historic suspicion of free markets has posed profound obstacles to economic progress for Blacks. She has observed that the percentages of Black men and women employed in managerial and professional occupations are far below that of whites and that “blacks account for precious few” knowledge and creative workers. She suggests that when diversity translates into dollars, Blacks will have more opportunity. Therefore, she has urged Black people to “relinquish the tunnel vision that has dominated the past half century and refocus energies upon increasing opportunity through job training and education.”

Larson suggests that if diversity has a bottom line payoff, market forces will promote diversity. A 1994 study by Covenant Investment Management, which rated the performance of the Standard and Poor’s 500 on a series of factors relating to the hiring and advancement of women and nonwhites, found the annualized return for the companies that rated lowest in equal employment opportunities issues, 218 | P a g e

average 7.9 percent, compared to 18.3 percent for the 100 companies that rated highest in their equal employment opportunities. According to the report, “the stock market performance of the firms that were high performers on the glass ceiling-related goals was 2.5 times higher than that of the firms that invested little in glass ceiling-related issues.”

However, there is no clear correlation between diversity and profits and therefore for most firms diversity is viewed as simply being “politically correct.”

But, in reality, a firm’s brand matters – to its employees, customers, suppliers and shareholders. In the global economy, businesses simply cannot afford to ignore diversity. Given the racial and ethnic mix of both domestic and global markets, ignoring entire segments of the consumer base makes no business sense. By employing a natural mix of men, women, and employees form diverse backgrounds, a business is more likely to develop and market products that will sell in today's pluralistic environment. In the Supreme Court case if Grutter v. v.

Bollinger, which addressed whether a white student not accepted to law school was subject to a reverse race discrimination, a group of brand name corporations filed a brief in support of the university’s diversity efforts, writing that cross-cultural experiences helped them succeed both domestically and internationally. In their experience, they argued: Individuals who have been educated in a diverse setting are more likely to succeed, because they can make valuable contributions to the workforce in several important and concrete ways. First, a diverse group of individuals educated in 219 | P a g e

a cross-cultural environment has the ability to facilitate unique and creative approaches to problem solving arising from the integration of different perspectives. Second, such individuals are better able to develop products and services that appeal to a variety of consumers and to market offerings in ways that appeal to those consumers.

Third, a racially diverse group of managers with cross-cultural experience is better able to work with business partners, employees, and clientele in the United States and around the world.

Fourth, individuals who have been educated in a diverse setting are likely to contribute to a positive work environment, by decreasing incidents of discrimination and stereotyping. Overall, an educational environment that ensures participation by diverse people, viewpoints and ideas will help produce the most talented workforce.

By and large, the racial wedge issues of the nineteen seventies and eighties, such welfare reform, affirmative action and immigration have never subsided and have been made even more acute with white anxiety caused by globalization and mass job loss. In the middle of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, serial police killings of Black men and women triggered widespread protest and social protest and a wider cultural discussion about race and gender bias.

Sensitivity to diversity issues at work became heightened as many employers stepped up training and internal dialogues.

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A majority of employees seemed to have embraced these discussions. Seizing on a political opportunity, President Trump issued an Executive Order Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping that prohibited federal contractors and grantees from engaging in some forms of training. The Order prohibited training that “is grounded in hierarchies based on collective social and political identities rather than in the inherent and equal dignity of every person as an individual.

This ideology is rooted in the pernicious and false belief that America is an irredeemably racist and sexist country; that some people, simply on account of their race or sex, are oppressors; and that racial and sexual identities are more important than our common status as human beings and Americans.�

The Order was a powerful political and cultural statement that picked at the festering American scab of distrust and suspicion between Blacks and whites but had nothing to do with diversity training that promotes teamwork and cooperation. At its best, diversity is about interpersonal communication, cultural competency and business success.

Such training is social and is about belonging; in short, the same social dynamic that supports the free flow of information to advance innovation.

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5. The Meaning of Work Studs Turkel, already a well-known radio broadcaster in his native Chicago and the author of two books, on the great depression and on his home city, published his acclaimed Working in 1974 containing more than one hundred men and women about the work they did all day and how they felt about it. Terkel wrote that Working was “about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying”. 248 The world of work described by Turkel more stable and predictable than it is today, two decades into the twenty first century. Working depicts a time just before great changes happened in the workplace, changes that no one in the book predicted. While some of the specific jobs in Working have disappeared, research suggests that the meaning of work for most Americans has not changed much since Terkel conducted his interviews. 249 Pride, the pride of craftsmanship is harder and harder to sustain. Strikingly, however, the people who seem genuinely to find meaning in their work are those who serves others, like the Brooklyn fireman who muses, "You see them give mouth-to-mouth when a guy's dying. You can't get around that shit. That's real. To me, that's what I want to be." For others, like the 248

Turkel, S. Working (1974) 12 Cox, P. The meaning of Work: Studs Turkel’s Working as a Teaching Tool (2004) https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.868.732& rep=rep1&type=pdf 249

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steelworker, who longs for meaning, work has no point when it has no tangible outcome: Somebody built the pyramids. Somebody's going to build something. Pyramids, Empire State Building - these things just don't happen. There's hard work behind it. I would like to see a building, say, the Empire State, I would like to see on one side of it a foot-wide strip from top to bottom with the name of every bricklayer, the name of every electrician, with all the names. So, when a guy walked by, he could take his son and say, "See, that's me over there on the forty-fifth floor. I put the steel beam in." Picasso can point to a painting. What can I point to? A writer can point to a book. Everybody should have something to point to. 250 The Pyramids were constructed by large work gangs over a period of many years. The Greek historian Herodotus documented that he was told that it took 100,000 men twenty years to build the Great Pyramid at Giza. Scholars today, however, think it may have been built by only 20,000 men over twenty years. Current thinking about Egyptian society is that it was organized somewhat like a feudal system, in which almost everyone owed service to a lord or benefactor.

The Egyptians called this "bak." Everybody owed bak of some kind to people above them in the social hierarchy.

Skeletons excavated from the site show that the mass of laborers were probably not slaves but native Egyptian agricultural laborers who worked on the pyramids during the time of year when the Nile River flooded much of the land 250

Turkel at 249

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nearby. Approximately 2.3 million blocks of stone, averaging about 2.5 tons each, had to be cut, transported and assembled to build the pyramid. Since the fields were under water during the summer, scholars believe that some form of wages were earned in building the gigantic pyramids supplementing the farmer’s family income. Obligatory labor ranged from peasants all the way to the most elite engineers and scientists but it would have been compensated. 251

The idea of work as an obligatory action owed to a lord or deity was the heart of a structured and ordered Western society for many centuries. Arising from this obligation in more modern times was the code of craftsmanship, the desire to do something well for its own sake and in doing so to serve the higher order of things. As previously noted, the idea that work was both ennobling and a path to salvation had its roots in the Protestant Reformation and, indeed, within the JudeoChristian tradition as a whole. The meaning of work was not 251

Although Egyptian laborers building a tomb for Ramesses III in 1170 B.C. went on strike. Marantz, A. “The Anti-Coup,� The New Yorker, Nov 23, 2020 at 42

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to secure personal material wealth, but to discipline the soul and to serve God. By the Industrial Revolution, this creed had been secularized to mean prudence, frugality and delayed gratification. Today, the secular desire for selffulfillment is not without its profound spiritual quality.

Whether a lifestyle or calling, or whether the reward comes in the hereafter or here and now, or whether the work performed is to serve God or to serve yourself, the bottom line is the same: be humbled by your talents, gifts and abilities and always strive to do your best.

Many artists claim to love their work. They approach their craft with great intensity and focus, a mindfulness in which they are absorbed in the activity for its own sake. Working for a goal or a specific outcome, on the other hand, is not activity for its own sake. Love has nothing to do with it.

However, even artists and craftsmen had to perform their work as part of the market exchange if they are to take part in the collective work of expressing and building collective culture. The production of art is the result of a solemn obligation taken up by the artist and is enabled by the patron or enterprise that supports the artist and her work. The artist and craftsman, like any worker are engaged in a livelihood and to do so must be part of the market exchange. They work for a commission or price or fee. Even the great Michelangelo Buonarroti, “although he made the David and the Sistine, had also to make money. He was entangled with shrewd men of business, and crafty spendthrifts, ambitious intriguers, folks who used undoubted talent for baser purposes of gain or getting on.� 252 The work was no less satisfying for it.

252

John Addington Symonds. The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti (1928) p. 139

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At twenty-four, Michelangelo executed a contract with Cardinal di San Dionigi, Pope Julius’ agent in 1498. It was agreed that the sculptor of Florence would “make a Pieta of marble at his own cots. That is to say a Virgin Mary clothed, with the dead Christ in her arms, of the size of a proper man, for the price of 450 golden ducats of the Papal mint, within the term of one year from the day of commencement of said work.” Jacopo Gallo, Michelangelo’s friend and banker, signed as guarantor, pledging that the young sculptor “will finish said work within one year, and that it shall be the finest work in marble which Rome today can show, and that no master our days shall be able to produce better . . . I pledge my word.” 253

Here we see the artisan’s solemn oath reduced to a contract.

Certainly, the sculptor will devote himself with all his talents 253

Id. at 44-45.

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to producing a magnificent, one-of-a-kind product. But he is not going to do it without getting paid. The artisan is also promising (perhaps over promising to receive the commission) to produce the bet work ever displayed at that time While clearly a commercial exchange, the performance of the contract is imbued with a profound moral integrity.

Since the genius of the sculptor’s personality will be expressed in the statue, he, and a guarantor, are obliged to stand behind the finished result.

Certainly, Michelangelo Buonarroti, apprentice at age twelve, was the most accomplished artist of his time and, most likely, of all time, at least insofar as Western civilization is concerned. Not only was he a great sculptor, painter, draughtsman, architect, designer of bridges, roads and fortifications, and poet he was in personal charge of all of his great enterprises. For most of his greatest works of sculpture, whether the Pieta, or the David, or the Medici Moses, Michelangelo personally negotiated the contract, including the time of delivery and price. For months at a time, he personally selected and supervised the excavation of the marble, as well as supervised its blocking. He supervised and paid for the transport of massive blocks of marble by sea then oversaw its transport over land to his workshop. He made the sketches and clay models; and hired, paid and supervised his journeymen and assistants. He also paid for their transport, room and board, which was a common labor practice at the time. He often paid for and supervised the construction of the scaffolding. Then he worked night and day, often alone, on the project, providing ongoing written reports to the Popes and noblemen who had commissioned him. He kept meticulous financial records and often would re-negotiate the commission to cover costs.

Often he would go out-of-pocket to pay for supplies and his 227 | P a g e

assistant’s wages. He fired assistants in fits of anger and frustration. He complained about their poor work habits. He worked mercilessly and would become physically ill with fatigue and poor nutrition. He went on strike until he was reimbursed for his expenses. He left many works incomplete and unfinished. The most famous and sought after artist of the High Renaissance suffered from anxiety and panic attacks. He would leave a major project for months, without forwarding address, experiencing bouts of melancholy. He made much money over his lifetime and could have easily lived as an aristocrat but lived instead as a meager servant, indifferent to material needs. Unlike Picasso, he was disinterested in cashing-in by selling signed brick-a-brac as he grew older, preferring to live at a near poverty level to his last days.

He was beloved by admirers, nurtured and patronized by heads of state and popes, and scandalized by rivals. He supported a father and set up three brothers in business. During the two-year siege of Florence in 1529 to 1530, he was commissioned into the city’s executive council and supervised the city’s defenses and fortifications. An ardent student of literature, he was a prolific writer of letters and sonnets. Near the end of his long life, he was badgered by friends for drawings and artifacts that they knew would command great sums after his death. His studio was broken into more than once and he burned nearly all of his drawings before he died. As far as we know, he never made love to either a woman or a man, having been celibate his entire life, although he shared platonic love with a few men and women.

He died without a will.

Such was the life-work of one of the greatest and most celebrated master artisans of all time, who seemed called to his craft by a higher power and who worked with heart, soul, mind and hand. His chalk and ink were an extensions of his 228 | P a g e

brain, hand and eye. His chisel and mallet where extensions of his entire body, working quickly, alternating between right and left hands. His chiseling was at times so ferocious, chipping away two inches of marble with each strike like a piston that his face was left bloody by the flying shards. His body was covered in white dust as if he were caught in a snowstorm. He fashioned lit candles in his hat so as to work by night. He was reluctant to share his techniques with other artists, including his apprentices. He all but invented modern art by leaving parts of some sculptures chisel-toothed and rough, partly to show the artistic process but mainly to create mood and convey emotion through texture alone. To say that Michelangelo was devoted to his craft is, of course, an understatement. To say that he epitomizes the Artist as Hero in Western culture would be more than a fair statement. To suggest that any artisan with a chisel and mallet could reach such heights in craftsmanship would be an exaggeration.

In Western history, craftsmanship, especially as it developed in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries probably constitutes one of the peaks in the evolution of creative work. Renaissance and later Enlightenment philosophers paved the way for seeing humans as individualized agents of their own will. An entire republican ideology of self-owned and self-directed labor emerged in early America. Under this view, a person is free only to the extent he or she can participate in self-government. Persons who worked for wages lacked the moral and political independence to act for themselves as free citizens. Thomas Jefferson thought that only yeoman farmers and small producers possessed the virtue and independence that made republican citizens. He deplored working for wages as a form of dependence and servitude. “Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the 229 | P a g e

designs and ambitions of despots.” 254 Although a slaveholder, Jefferson sharply opposed the concentration of workers and machines in cities, believing it would lead to the concentration of wealth and property and with it, the erosion of liberty and self-governance.

The craftsman, like the farmer, has been mythologized by many philosophers and social commentators for polemical reasons. Unlike other forms of employment and service, indentured or otherwise, the craftsman’s work has been viewed as heroic; not just about mastering a set of techniques. More fundamentally, it is about the unity of conception and execution. And control of process and pace of work. The craftsman was particularly idealized in early America. Here, it is worth quoting at length from the Heroic Artisan:

254

Sandel, Michael J. Democracy’s Discontents (1996). Pp. 143-144 quoting Notes on the State of Virginia.

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He was the honest craftsman, sleeves rolled up, apron tied around his body, toiling away in his small, independently-owned shop. The Heroic Artisan could be found working and tinkering in breweries, printing houses, and blacksmith shops throughout the new nation.

Farmers who owned and worked small pieces of land (unlike the Genteel Patriarch’s vast estates) could also be counted among the ranks of the Heroic Artisan.

For the Heroic Artisan, manliness meant primarily independence and self-reliance. His independence made him an invaluable citizen of the new republic: a man whose vote could not be bought or sold.

Although fiercely independent, the Heroic Artisan also valued community. He was loyal to his fellow craftsmen, treated his customers/neighbors fairly, and embraced his civic duties. He was the patriarch of his family, and with his shop often located in or near his family’s house, was able to oversee his household throughout the day.

Work relationships were very personal for the Heroic Artisan. He didn’t hire random strangers to work in his shop but took in the sons of neighbors and friends as apprentices, teaching them all the secrets of his craftsman’s guild. Thus, the Heroic Artisan didn’t see himself as merely a boss, but rather as a mentor who had a responsibility not only to mold his young apprentice into a master

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craftsman, but also to initiate him into manhood. 255 I call the reader’s attention to an exquisite work of art housed at the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, Italy called The Alchemist’s Studio painted in 1597 by Jan van der Stract, known as Giovanni Stradano in Italy. In the painting we see the human scale and intimacy of the artisan shop. An apprentice is concentrated on his craft under the tutelage of a sage master. A younger apprentices handling a large beaker is close enough to listen intently. A wary journeyman straining at a crank is too far from the interaction as the master, having consulted a craft book, is teaching the secrets to his favored pupil. He wants to be privy to the secrets being entrusted to the apprentice but perhaps he not fully trusted by the master because of the potential for competition. A boy grinds pestle to mortar with two hands, the pestle as tall as the boy himself. Unskilled laborers lift and pour raw material. A learned elder studiously cooks a brew, the large kettle ablaze. Only the well-fed cat reposed in warmth under a cooking beaker is not at work. Time is not measured in hours or days. Having represented four generations of worker in elaborate richness, Stradano gives the viewer a glimpse of craft-time, labor that spans a lifetime.

255

McKay, B &K. Three Archetypes of American Manliness - Part II, The Heroic Artisan (2020) https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/3archetypes-of-american-manliness-part-ii-the-heroic-artisan/

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We have made the case that work is an intrinsically human activity and that it has profound psychological and social consequences but we have yet defined what work really is.

Is making a tuna sandwich work? If I made it for myself because I was hungry or for a friend to share, we would not call it work. If I got paid to make the same sandwich and serve to a customer, it would be work. Would catching the tuna be work? The same effort could be a form of recreation or a job. What about gutting the tuna? While that activity may require special skills, it may or may not be someone’s job. 256 Certainly, canning the tuna is work. So, at a 256

For a riveting description of the ritual of gutting and cleaning fish, see Big Two Hearted River by Ernest Hemingway as Nick, the protagonist of the story, kills and cleans the trout be catches, by

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minimum, we may say that work is an activity that is done for another.

We do many things for others, of course, for members of the family, friends and neighbors. While this activity is other directed, it is done for altruistic reasons. In the modern sense, we cannot call this activity work. I can drive my neighbor to her doctor’s appointment because I am a good neighbor.

If I were an Uber driver doing the same thing, I would be working. Therefore, work must confer a benefit to the person performing it and in a market economy, that benefit is remunerative, whether in the form of cash, equity or other form of value. Work, then, is something that is performed as part of a market bargain. As noted, even the greatest of artists created their masterpieces for compensation. In short, to be work, in the present sense, the activity must be done for another in exchange for remuneration.

Work within the market exchange hardly feels heroic. But for many, it is not without meaning. It is often performed with energy, creativity and purpose. Summarizing the research, meaningful work has three criteria – autonomy, complexity and reward (both extrinsic and intrinsic).

Employees who manage their own work, subject to structure and guidance; learn new ways and technologies to perform their work; and who get compensated well, instilling a sense

bashing their heads on a log, which is the humane way recommended by seasoned fishermen and “slitting them from the vent to the tip of the jaw.”

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of pride, satisfaction, mastery and engagement find great meaning in their work.

According to Locke, each person plainly has “a property in his own person,” including the labor of his body, and the work of his hands.” He continues by explaining “a freeman makes himself a servant to another by selling him, for a certain time, the service he undertakes to do in exchange for wages he is to receive.” Thereafter, that labor no longer belongs to the free man but to the master. “Thus,” writes Locke “the turfs my servant has cut, I have a right to them and it is my property without the assignment or consent of anybody. The [servant’s] labor has fixed my property in them.” As such, we do not own the result of our work, whether the result is chair or a cellphone or even the idea for the chair or the cellphone. For many of us, there is no real meaning in the work that we perform other than as a means to an end – compensation, which is then used to provide necessities and to leverage for credit. The work may be satisfactory and we may enjoy working with others, but it is the paycheck that has meaning, not the work. An honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay is a motto that we can live by. We exchange our labor for pay but the market exchange sometimes looks like a race to the bottom. As Adam Smith observed, the worker often dislikes expending effort but likes getting paid. The employer dislikes paying the worker but needs the work that the worker performs. The objectives of employer and employee are thus diametrically opposed: The worker wants to be paid as much as possible for doing as little work as possible, whereas the employer wants to get as much work as possible from the worker while paying as little as possible.

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What does it mean when an employer says that employees are its most important assets or that employees drive business growth? Most employers do not devote time or money to talent management because they need people to fill jobs not to drive the growth of the business. Filling jobs is by nature transactional and is almost always reactive, not really aligned with an articulable business objective other than to “get the job done,� In contrast, competing for the best talent requires a planned approach that is aligned with business objectives both in the present and future. Employer branding research provides important insight into what is needed for employers to compete. At a minimum, an attractive compensation and benefits package and workfamily balance are indispensable. Challenging work and an internal career path are also important. While job security cannot be promised, a pleasant work environment is achievable.

Employer brand research provides important insight into the talent management strategies that could be implemented by employers that compete for talent. A systematic, crosscultural study of employer brands demonstrates that the same basic five categories drive recruitment and retention (with slight variations by age cohort). 257 What Employees Want 59% Compensation/Benefits 46% Work-life balance 45% Job Security 257

Randstad Global Report (2019) https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/481927/REBR%20Global%20report% 202019.pdf

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44% Pleasant work environment 37% Career progression Why Employees Leave 39% 37% 29% 28% 28%

Compensation/Benefits Limited Career path/opportunities Work-life balance Insufficient Challenges Lack of recognition/rewards

Reasons Employees Stay 50% 41% 40% 38% 36%

Compensation/Benefits Work-life balance Job Security Pleasant work environment Career progression

In 1991, Pope John Paul II in Centesimus Annus had summed up this tradition in the context of the emerging “knowledge economy”: The original source of all that is good is the very act of God, who created both the earth and man, and who gave the earth to man so that he might have dominion over it by his work and enjoy its fruits (Genesis, 1:28). God gave the earth to the whole human race for the sustenance of all its members, without excluding or favoring anyone…. But the earth does not yield its fruits without a particular human response to God's gift, that is to say, without work. It is through work that man, using his 237 | P a g e

intelligence and exercising his freedom, succeeds in dominating the earth and making it a fitting home. In this way, he makes part of the earth his own, precisely the part which he has acquired through work; this is the origin of individual property.

In history, these two factors — work and the land — are to be found at the beginning of every human society.

However, they do not always stand in the same relationship to each other. At one time the natural fruitfulness of the earth appeared to be, and was in fact, the primary factor of wealth, while work was, as it were, the help and support for this fruitfulness. In our time, the role of human work is becoming increasingly important as the productive factor both of non-material and of material wealth. Moreover, it is becoming clearer how a person's work is naturally interrelated with the work of others. More than ever, work is work with others and work for others: it is a matter of doing something for someone else. Work becomes ever more fruitful and productive to the extent that people become more knowledgeable of the productive potentialities of the earth and more profoundly cognizant of the needs of those for whom their work is done.

In our time, in particular, there exists another form of ownership, which is 238 | P a g e

becoming no less important than land: the possession of know-how, technology and skill. The wealth of the industrialized nations is based much more on this kind of ownership than on natural resources. (Emphasis in the original) Peter Drucker coined the term “knowledge worker” in 1959 but left the definition rather circular. To Drucker, a knowledge worker is one who works primarily with information or one who develops and uses knowledge in the workplace. In The Work of Nations Robert Reich placed the knowledge worker into the narrower - but more carefully defined - category of “symbolic analyst.” According to Reich, “symbolic analysts solve, identify, and broker problems by manipulating symbols.” Their tools are “mathematical algorithms, legal arguments, financial gimmicks, scientific principles, psychological insights…systems of induction or deduction, or any other set of techniques for doing conceptual puzzles.” For this type of worker, it’s the input of knowledge and not the production process that adds value. “Final production is often the easiest part. The bulk of the time and cost (and, thus, real value) comes in conceptualizing the problem, devising a solution, and planning its execution.”

A rough estimate of the percentage of truly indispensable workers at about one in one thousand, as measured narrowly by the skills and abilities that make a customer come back for more. The Gallup research on engagement suggests about fourteen percent of workers are highly valued due not their extraordinary level of engagement, commitment and willingness to share what they know. They have their best 239 | P a g e

ideas at work and in the knowledge intensive environment must be considered part of the organization’s core. This, of course, is conjecture but experience and case studies lend more than an air of credence to this hypothesis. Research suggests that these core workers are motivated intrinsically, in various degrees, by autonomy, esteem and learning. The social science literature suggests that their work is a form of personal or creative expression, permitting them to “selfactualize.” It is thought to be the highest form of social development.

In 1960, Douglas McGregor, through his well-known “Theory X and Theory Y” drew a distinction between the assumptions about human motivation which underlie these two approaches. Greatly influenced by Maslow’s theory of human motivation, Theory X assumes that people dislike work and must be coerced, controlled, and directed toward organizational goals. Furthermore, most people prefer to be treated this way, so they can avoid responsibility. Theory Y emphasizes the average person’s intrinsic interest in his work, his desire to be self-directing and to seek responsibility, and his capacity to be creative in solving business problems. 258 According to McGregor, organizations with a Theory X approach tend to have several tiers of managers and supervisors to oversee and direct workers. Authority is rarely delegated, and control remains firmly centralized. Managers are more authoritarian and actively intervene to get things done. In contrast, Theory Y managers have an optimistic, positive opinion of their people, and they use a decentralized, participative management style. This encourages a more collaborative, trust-based relationship 258

McGregor, D. The Human Side of Enterprise (1960)

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between managers and their team members. Theory Y holds that employees should be trusted and empowered. McGregor argued at a time when labor-management relations were becoming more adversarial that there was another way to view workers and leadership.

Elaborating, McGregor observed that a successful team has an “informal, comfortable, relaxed atmosphere,” broad participation in discussions, tasks or objectives that are well understood, constructive disagreement, decisions mostly reached by consensus, the chair does not dominate, the group frequently “will stop to examine how well it is doing, “and “members listen to each other!” 259 According to researchers Kim and Mauborgne (1998) “the ability to express one’s ideas or bilateral communication, which is the key element to engagement, implies the opportunity to voice one’s perceptions, knowledge, and ideas, and the need to hear opposite parties out. This increases the likelihood that a high rate of knowledge and expertise will be diffused and shared.” In 2006, researchers at the university of Southern California and New York University published a noel theory to explain why humans seek out information, often for its own sake. Human beings, they wrote in American Scientist are designed to be “infovores” because knowledgeable people are more attractive mating partners, a fact that appears to be true across cultures, and because knowledge tends to increase the chances of survival. The researchers also found that when people acquire new knowledge the brain is rewarded with a morphine-like substance as it connects bits of information into a cohesive whole. Apparently, “knowledge high” is the result of the integrating and understanding new information.

259

Id. at 34.

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Researchers and commentators have opined that such motivators are what drive knowledge workers. The U.S. Department of Labor’s most recent Longitudinal Survey on Job Satisfaction suggests that most working Americans are reasonable satisfied with their jobs. It appears that autonomy, meaning, affiliation and learning may be the necessary ingredients to nurture meaning at work. To this end, several companies have created “communities of practice,” groups of employees of similar professional or other interests that cross boundaries of departments and units. For example, Schlumberger, LTD is an oil and fuel services company with 52,000 employees spread over 80 countries that has created 23 communities ranging from chemistry to engineering, with about 140 special interest sub-groups. The company reports that 11,750 employees belong to a group. Uniquely, these communities elect their own leaders and govern themselves so that peer review and esteem remain powerful drivers of innovation and knowledge sharing.

Make no mistake; while this environment can create competition and professional jealousy, the development of shared repositories and discussion databases that were actively managed by the community can foster a sense of mutual trust and obligation.

In these shared spaces, individuals begin to evaluate who is making contributions to the greater community knowledge pool, and they began to judge the willingness of others to share the documents, templates, and other similar knowledge. The company spends about one million dollars a year on these “Eureka” communities, as they are called, and compared to other knowledge initiatives, it is costeffective.

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While many workers are, in part, motivated by the intrinsic nature of their work and the value of collaborative innovation, the corporate world is filled with moral ambiguities and knowledge workers have little control over the consequences of their work. In the end, most workers remain at will employees, agents of the corporate employer to which they owe a legal duty of loyalty and faithfulness.

Workers are paid to perform services and their compensation will reflect only their own individual effort, although the value of the collective effort is much greater. The knowledge worker may receive extra compensation for his or her effort or the brilliant idea that she has produced but the work is performed for hire and, therefore, the worker will have no ownership interest in the intellectual property that is created.

Thus, the knowledge worker’s motivation and engagement will always be like any other worker at some undefined ethical point where the psychic costs associated with the lack of ownership and control over the consequences of the work outweighs the intrinsic reward gained by the work performed. Having reached this ethical tipping point, the at will worker can always voluntarily terminate employment but the obstacles to starting over, often with lower pay, may be too great to surmount. If the knowledge worker seeks control or ownership over the intellectual property he or she is sued for disloyalty or misappropriation. If the knowledge worker objects to the consequences of the intellectual property or how it is used, he or she can be terminated without legal recourse.

In the Rise of the Creative Class, Richard Florida glibly paraphrases Drucker and notes that knowledge workers are increasingly becoming owners of their know-how because “more workers than ever control the means of production, because it’s inside their head.” However, no individual who 243 | P a g e

works for pay owns anything that she produces for the employer, which includes any intellectual property that is created on the job. Consider the case of Dr. Kai-Fu Lee, Microsoft and Google. Dr. Lee was working at Microsoft as vice president of a division overseeing technologies for speech recognition, search and language processing. He held a doctorate in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University, where he worked as an assistant professor before joining Apple Computer. He spent six years at Apple and worked at Silicon Graphics, Inc. before joining Microsoft.

At some point during his employment with Microsoft, Dr. Lee signed an employment agreement, which provided in relevant part: While employed at Microsoft and for a period of one year thereafter, I will not‌engage in activities competitive with products, services or projects (including actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development) on which I worked or about which I learned confidential or proprietary information or trade secrets while employed at Microsoft . .

The agreement further provided:

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Confidential or proprietary information or trade secrets means all data and information in whatever form, tangible or intangible, that is not generally known to the public and that relates to the business, technology, practices, products, marketing, sales, services, finances, or legal affairs of Microsoft ...

Dr. Lee is credited with establishing Microsoft’s research and development center in Beijing, which houses about 380 researchers. Upon his return from a short sabbatical, Dr. Lee gave notice to Microsoft that he was leaving for a job at Google as president of that company’s China operations in charge of establishing a research center there. Microsoft’s lawsuit quickly followed, alleging that Dr. Lee had violated his employment agreement and seeking a court order enjoining him from setting up Google’s shop in China. In short, Microsoft was saying that Dr. Lee was not free to leverage knowledge and know-how gained in its employ.

After a hearing, a Washington State judge permitted Dr. Lee to begin working for Google in a limited capacity but ordered him not to work on “products, services or projects” that compete with Microsoft, including Internet searching and speech technologies. In short, the court found that Microsoft did not own Dr. Lee’s reputation and his academic contacts. His reputation and contacts were not Microsoft products, services or projects but the special, unique or extraordinary concepts that he produced belonged to 245 | P a g e

Microsoft. Accordingly, Dr. Lee was allowed to leverage his reputation and relationships in only a limited way to further Google’s interests by recruiting personnel, working with the Chinese government, and by offering non-technical advice about how to do business in China. Because the court found that Dr. Lee’s reputation and academic relationships did not belong to Microsoft, it did not need to decide whether “intangible information related to Microsoft’s business” could be deemed proprietary to the company.

In our time, almost all intellectual property is owned by corporations as the work done by employees and contractors is “work for hire.” Knowledge workers, like production workers, can never get paid the full value of their work. On the other hand, few employees can be innovative separate and independent from the value-adding catalyst that only an organization can provide. In any event, corporations have pulled knowledge from the public domain and privatized it as their own intellectual property. Today, nearly two hundred million Americans hold a job but corporations own almost one hundred percent of patents. Today, much of what we call “human capital”, which is the value-added knowledge created by employees, belongs to the employer.

Under these circumstances, getting employees to actually create valuable knowledge, even if they were motivated to do so, is extremely difficult. As Michael Perelman points out in Steal This Idea, almost half of U.S. Gross National Product involves some form of an intellectual property transaction, which represents enormous wealth. Thus, it is critical for business that the intellectual property created by an employee belong to the business, including ideas that may not be patentable or copyrighted. As Perelman states: “Ownership of the human capital allows the worker to earn a higher wage, but they have no more rights to the product that they produce then a machine does.”

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To the extent that employees are expected to create and use value-added knowledge, it is codified and owned by their employers. Thereafter, they may be discharged at will and prevented from using much of what they have learned on the job to earn a living in the future. The dirty little secret about the “new” economy is that is it basically no different than the old economy; employers view the majority of employees as mere labor cost. They are not encouraged to increase their value because it would undermine efficiency and standardization. It is basically scientific management; employees are paid to do, not think. Therefore, the goal is not to increase the information content of most jobs thereby making them more interesting and challenging; rather the goal is to standardize and codify as much know-how as possible, so that jobs can be de-skilled, outsourced or automated. For the elite, creative worker that is actually paid to innovate, the law ensures that the fruits of that labor belong to the employer.

Accordingly, when a chief executive says, “people are our most important asset” he (almost always “he” since by 2018, still only fifteen of the Fortune 500 companies had CEOs who were women) is really speaking of a small percentage of the firm’s employees. Everyone else is merely labor cost.

As such, for most companies, “knowledge management” is nothing more than squeezing standardized inputs into a template to achieve predictable outcomes. For example, in 2000, David Birch, an influential futurist and business consultant, was interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, during which he observed: “What this means as an employer is that you’ve got to start designing the things that you do, the skill sets, the nature of your work around that. It has got to be interchangeable parts. You’ve got to de-skill most of the things you do, so that any number of people who you hire can come in, in a relatively short period of time, and perform that job.” Work would resemble “a Lego game, of red and 247 | P a g e

blue pieces and yellow pieces.” While jobs may not be displaced wholesale, the modularization of many tasks may make most jobs permanently, short-term and contingent in nature.

Similarly, in many industries, contingent work has become the norm. Even highly skilled professionals and technicians have found themselves part of the contingent workforce.

According to the Rand study, “most of the research on alternative workforces attributes technological change, heightened international competition, new management paradigms, deregulation, and the increasing costs of taxes and benefits as leading economic factors generating growth of the alternative workforce.” These alternatives include independent contracting, freelancing and temporary work assignments. By the end of the twentieth century, as many as forty percent of all workers in Silicon Valley were contingent workers. 260 At Google, have of the people who work for the company are classified as contractors, In The New Pioneers, Thomas Petzinger calls “knowledge management” a “great oxymoron” since for most corporations it amounts to nothing more than creating a database of best practices that gives employees a menu of responses from which to choose. He notes that firms have learned to “Taylorize” white-collar work. These so-called “knowledge workers” are paid for what they do, not for what they think. Corporations have long been thought to suppress the “social function” of creativity and knowledge diffusion.

Joseph Schumpeter, who coined the phrase “creative destruction” to explain the dynamics of capitalism, noted that work in big organization’s committees replaced individual action and decision-making. He predicted that 260

Fraser, J.A. White Collar Sweatshop (2001) at p. 141.

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entrepreneurs would disappear as innovation became concentrated in corporate labs and offices. 261 This prediction has come to pass.

In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt distinguished between Animal laborens and Homo faber—between man as a worker, thoughtlessly and amorally lost in his labor’s object, and man as a maker of society and its institutions, a builder of life in common. For Arendt, the maker had it all over the worker, who was, in her view, basically an indentured servant, alienated from his work and devoid of any social meaning. While this distinction is perhaps too contemptuous of practical life, at least in theory, a knowledge worker appears closer to a maker of his or her society and the institutions of the new economy. In many ways, some modern knowledge workers can be compared favorable to artisans and craftsmen. The work may require intense, constant involvement and ongoing learning. It often requires thousands of hours of what might be called an apprenticeship. Such a person is not engaged in uniform activity or the mere expenditure of energy, but rather is engaged in something psychologically meaningful, akin to a craft, where spontaneity, exuberance and freedom to perform make work and play nearly identical. The work is naturally creative. Such “free conscious activity constitutes the species-character” of the knowledge worker.

But what kind of culture is made when technology obscures the full meaning of work? Unlike the craftsman whose identity was forged through a social or communal consciousness, the elite knowledge worker of today is released from the need for communion and instead finds meaning and context in an abstract self-fulfillment. Unlike 261

Schumpeter, J. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942)

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the craft worker, who could see the fruits of his labor immediately - a chair, for example, it can be hard to find gratification from work that is largely intangible, or from delivering “goods” that are often symbolic. You can't even leave a permanent mark on a hard copy document in increasingly paperless offices. Thus, so-called knowledge work is more or less intangible or invisible and gets done in teams so it's difficult to realize individual accomplishment.

Thus, abstract work often results in the suppression of a human dimension. For example, computer-assisted design has largely replaced architectural drawing. It has, of course, increased efficiency and lowered costs. As Sennett has observed in The Craftsman, the architect, having no need to put pen to paper, now works in a condition of estrangement from the physical world and from the “relational” aspects of his or her work. The result, Richard Sennett explains, is poorly designed structures at odds with their surroundings and with the human needs of their inhabitants.

To help employees focus less on meaning and more on positivity, some companies have adopted a type of “happy talk,” the purpose of which is to tap the wellspring of employee spirit. In many firms before the COVID-19 pandemic, “happyism” has taken hold of human resource departments. “No system, tool or methodology . . . can beat the productivity boost you get from really, really enjoying your work,” declares consultant Alexander Kjerulf, selfdescribed “Chief Happiness Officer.” Pre-COVID, HR journals brimmed with articles whose tenor can be summed up in a passage from the May 2007 issue of Personnel Today: “The pursuit of true happiness has become a burning issue for politicians, economists and psychologists, and far from assuming that happiness is a personal matter, employers, too, should be doing far more to put smiles on 250 | P a g e

the faces of staff.” But fake happiness on the job is not a substitute for meaningful work. Nevertheless, enormous resources are devoted to fads, quacks and frauds. Of the $29 billion that companies invested in outsourced training in 2012, according to the American Society for Training & Development, a significant portion is earmarked for celebrity speakers, off-site seminars and “wilderness camps” designed to instill a positive outlook. In 2004, when Meeting Professionals International surveyed its membership, representing thousands of corporate and independent meeting planners, 81 percent noted a client preference for celebrity-delivered inspiration over skills-intensive training.

In short, happiness has become the new social identity within Corporate America, replacing meaning as a touchtone of satisfaction on the job, but there is no hard evidence that such induced positive thinking increases innovation, which still requires a depth of knowledge workers.

In Gross National Happiness, Arthur Brooks writes that most Americans report that they are happy with their individual circumstances, but one wonders whether an admission of unhappiness may equate with an admission of personal failure, which most people are reluctant to do. In any event, at least some percentage of “gross national happiness” appears inflated by the enormous amount of psychotropic drugs consumed by Americans; kind of like how a significant percentage of the stock market wealth during the nineteen nineties was inflated by crooked corporate bookkeeping or how the slugging percentage in Major League Baseball was inflated by steroids during that same time. The most widely prescribed drugs in America are antidepressants.

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In 2007 alone, doctors wrote 232 million prescriptions for such drugs, more than any other therapeutic class of medication, including prescriptions for pain, cholesterol management and hypertension. This represented an increase of 25 million prescriptions since 2003 and translates into an estimated 30 million patients in the United States who spent $12 billion on antidepressants, according to IMS Health, a market research firm. While the explosion in antidepressant prescriptions has set off a debate about what such widespread usage means, one thing is clear: many Americans appear depressed and are willing to take strong psychiatric medications that for decades had been prescribed for serious psychiatric problems. In the nineteen seventies, mood stabilizers such as lithium and Valium became widely available. They were followed in the ensuing decades by drugs such as Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft and a host of others that have been embraced by doctors and their patients. While there is no demonstrated cause and effect, it is interesting to note the transformation of the U.S. economy during this identical time frame. Manufacturing accounted for 25 percent of America’s GDP in the nineteen seventies but just 12 percent in 2006. Financial services, which amounted to 12 percent of GDP in the seventies, amounted to 20 percent in 2006. Services account for nearly 84 percent of nonconsumption based GNP. In other words, in a generation Americans have gone from manufacturing - the making of things- to providing services. While it could be as psychologically satisfying to provide a service as making a product, the stress associated with the occupational displacement to lower paying, but highly stressful, service jobs may account for some of the increase in prescription drug use. New research finds that in 1972, people without college degrees were nearly as happy as those with college 252 | P a g e

degrees. Now those without a degree, particularly white adults, are far more unhappy about their lives. 262 For Americans who profess a belief in liberty and autonomy, it is curious that so many have freely chosen meaningless work and dead-end jobs. For a people who extol in creative change, it is curious that so many have settled for dull complacency. For a people who profess a belief in free choice, it is stunning that so many have lost faith in their ability to make a difference in their lives, and have instead adopted a grim, secular predetermined fate of working to consume. Yet, as work has become less meaningful and as there is less control over economic livelihoods, Americans have turned to expanding their social relations (single parenting, same-sex marriage), bodily integrity (abortion, surrogate parenting, living wills), and personal expression (body art, transsexualism).

Still others have filled the void created by meaningless work with gun ownership as a form of expression and identity. 263 As Jill Lepore has pointed out, the guns right movement is tightly bound to anti- immigrant animus. 264 During so-called anti-lock down protests during the first wave of the COVID19 pandemic, as hospitals were strained to the limit with COVID patients, armed protestors intimidated doctors and legislators. About 40 percent of Americans say they or 262

Twenge, J. M., & Cooper, A. B. (2020). The expanding class divide in happiness in the United States, 1972–2016. Emotion. https://doi.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Femo0000774 263 In 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court decided District of Columbia v.

Heller, which held that an individual had a Second Amendment right to own a gun to protect a home. The decision was widely misinterpreted to mean that a person had a unilateral right to bear arms. In fact, gun ownership is regulated by the states.

264 Lepore, J. These Truths (2018) 675

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someone in their household owns a gun, and 22 percent of individuals , about 72 million people, report owning a gun, according to surveys from 2017 Pew and Harvard and Northeastern universities.

Americans also own a disproportionate share of the world’s firearms: The U.S. has just 4 percent of the world’s population but owns about 40 percent of civilian-owned guns globally, according to a 2018 report from the Switzerland-based Small Arms Survey (SAS). The SAS estimates that American civilians own 393 million guns, ranking the U.S. number one in firearms per capita. For many, gun ownership is an American fetish. Gun marketing is a shameless exploitation of insecurity and fear, including the fear of the end of civilization itself. Only religious sects make more money marketing the End Times.

And there are costs associated with these high levels of gun ownership: Researchers at Harvard have found that across developed nations, this widespread ownership of firearms is associated with higher rates of gun homicides. 265 While most gun owners say that they own a gun for self-defense and feel safer with a gun, a 2014 review of research published in the Annals of Internal Medicine also found that access to firearms was associated with a doubled risk for homicide and a tripled risk for suicide. A study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine in 2019 found that for each 10 percent increase in household gun ownership rates, there was a significant – 13 percent - increased incidence of domestic firearm homicide. 266

265

How Many People in the U.S. Own Guns? https://wamu.org/story/20/09/18/how-many-people-in-the-u-s-ownguns/ 266

Id.

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Moreover, in the two decades of the twenty-first century there have been no less eleven mass shootings of children in their schools – with hundreds of children killed. And while the number of fatalities from domestic terrorism is relatively low, the Homeland Threat Assessment released in 2020 by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security concluded that “racially and ethnically motivated violent extremists specifically white supremacist extremists (WSEs) - will remain the most persistent and lethal threat in the Homeland.� 267 Ignorance, disconnection, violence, extremism, homicide, suicide, substance abuse, child and spousal abuse, and immorality are direct evidence of the moral rot caused, in part, by chronic unemployment, job displacement and meaningless work. However, it is plausible that this cultural morbidity may be a psychic reaction to profound feelings of physical and emotional insecurity. After all, The TwentyFirst century started with a massive terrorist attack, followed by a state of constant war and economic and financial turmoil, which included enormous job losses and mortgage foreclosures, all of which is reverberated in a perpetual media feedback loop. In response, there was a complete lack of leadership at all levels. Even after waves of corporate malfeasance and crime, executive compensation skyrocketed. Wall Street bonuses after the taxpayer bailout

171 Center for Strategic and International Studies The War Comes Home: The Evolution of Domestic Terrorism in the United States (2020) https://www.csis.org/analysis/war-comes-home-evolution-domesticterrorism-united-states

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were the highest on record. Political leadership became dysfunctional, even destructive as America’s credit rating was subject to a self-inflicted wound. As the symbols of government, business and religious authority and trust lost all credibility, in one long terrible moment it became apparent that the sense of American duty, honor, unselfishness and essential goodness was merely an ugly self-deception, a mask for venality, greed and cynicism.

America elected a reality television personality president who had been divorced twice, had six bankruptcies, twentysix accusations of sexual misconduct, accused of one rape, been sued at least four thousand times and owed nine hundred million dollars to foreign banks. He had also funded the conspiratorial “birthers” who knowingly defamed Barack Obama, attacking him for his heritage and multicultural background, smearing him mercilessly as a foreigner, even as a member of a terrorist sleeper cell. All this before the disorientation of the coronavirus pandemic.

And while conspiracy theories are as old as human society, conspiracy beliefs and paranoia are now central elements in politics. People often adopt conspiracy beliefs as an expression of a deep sense of grievance or as psychological relief from a sense of loss of control, to make sense of a world that seems senseless. The personality features that are linked to conspiracy beliefs include entitlement, selfcentered impulsivity, lack of empathy, elevated levels of depressive moods and anxiousness. 268 “Odd beliefs and magical thinking” and “paranoid ideation” are also traits held by those who belief in conspiracies. People also believe 268

NY Times, Sept. 28, 2020 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/28/health/psychologyconspiracy-theories.html

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in conspiracy theories because they offer a way of understanding the world, a way that makes sense and provides some kind of meaning. People feel a sense of significance through absorbing and promoting esoteric but baseless theories.

As observed by David Brooks: People in this precarious state are going to demand stories that will both explain their distrust back to them and also enclose them within a safe community of believers . . .

Paradoxically, conspiracy theories have become the most effective community bonding mechanisms of the 21st century.

For those awash in anxiety and alienation, who feel that everything is spinning out of control, conspiracy theories are extremely effective emotional tools. For those in low status groups, they provide a sense of superiority: I possess important information most people do not have. For those who feel powerless, they provide agency: I have the power to reject “experts� and expose hidden cabals. As Cass Sunstein of Harvard Law School points out, they provide liberation: If

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I imagine my foes are completely malevolent, then I can use any tactic I want. 269 As previously noted, for Freud, work provided a sense of reality, a vital connection to society. Without meaningful work, an essential anchor to rational thought, conspiracy theories thrive and, particularly during the coronavirus pandemic, have become as dangerous as a loaded gun.

In an interview in 2020, Dr Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases wondered by people chose not to wear face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic even when medical evidence strongly suggested that wearing a mask reduced the spread of the virus. “I was stunned” he said “by the fact that in certain areas of the country, even though the devastation of the outbreak is clear, some people are still saying it’s fake news.

That is a very difficult thing to get over. Why people still insist that something that’s staring you right in the face is not real. “ 270 Several psychologists have speculated that some people have a sense of elitism, narcissist traits, or a betterthan-others kind of self-image, largely born of fear and feeling disconnected from others. Some mask refusers see the issue only in terms of their comfort and safety; out of

269

The Rotting of the Republican Mind Nov. 26, 2020

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/26/opinion/republicandisinformation.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

270

N.Y. Times Nov. 19, 2020 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/19/opinion/sunday/anthonyfauci-covid-interview.html?searchResultPosition=1

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thoughtlessness or selfishness and don't see the benefit of doing something for the greater good, even if it is inconvenient. “In general, people treat others the way they feel about themselves. So, if they don’t care about the welfare of others, it’s likely that they have deep insecurities where they have difficulty feeling compassion for themselves and exercising self-care.” 271 And while the American public has every right to complain and to be skeptical of their leaders and to bemoan their lack of accountability, one is left wondering about the lack of responsibility and accountability of the American people. In 2008, 1.7 million reports of child abuse were logged in America. Los Angeles County alone logged 173,000 such reports, an indicator that the most basic measure of personal responsibility in a society, the care and nurturing of future generations, is under strain. It seems pointless for the average American to expect their leaders to conduct themselves with high moral standards and to be accountable when they cannot even fulfill the most basic ethical obligation owed to themselves and their community.

Even as many Americans are now adrift in pathology, and perhaps a significant number posing a direct threat to society, by far, it is consumption that has substituted for the lack of meaning at work, as the producer has become a consumer. The nearly 18 trillion-dollar pre-COVID U.S. economy is based overwhelmingly on consumer consumption, nearly seventy percent. In many ways, this consumption is the sign of a mature economy that has 271

Gillespie, G. Why Some People Refuse to Wear a Face Mask, July 1, 2020 https://www.health.com/condition/infectiousdiseases/coronavirus/face-mask-refuse-to-wear-one-but-why

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transcended the old rules of scarcity and that has vaulted into the era of abundance and affluence. Indeed, Americans living below the poverty line are far better off than many “middle class” people in Asia and Africa. However, it is now apparent that this “affluence” masks the enormous amount of consumer debt and government borrowing that has sustained the consumption-based economy and that may now undermine the economic growth necessary to carry that debt over the long term. When Americans were producers borrowing was a decision made by a discerning consumer who calculated his or her ability to pay before making taking the plunge. This prudent consumer behavior may be traced to experiences of scarcity, particularly during the nineteen thirties, and echoes even further back to what Max Weber referred to as the Protestant Work Ethic. But more likely the producer knew that his pay was based on his production quota and therefore also knew that his purchasing power was limited by his physical capacity to produce. All things being equal, in a production economy consumer behavior struck a balance between meeting needs and, after much deliberation, springing for wants.

The economist John Maynard Keynes observed that the needs of human beings “fall within two classes - those needs which are absolute in the sense that we may feel them whatever the situation of our fellow human beings may be, and those which are relative only in that satisfaction lifts us above, makes us feel superior to, our fellows.” Robert Frank, an economist at Cornell University, has repopularized Keynes seminal observation and has observed that “keeping up with the Jones’” is the driving force of consumption.

“Only during the 1991 recession did Americans begin to realize that the postwar boom was well

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and truly over – for everybody.” 272 For most of the nineteen-nineties and well into the twenty first century, American savings rates actually fell below zero, as the nation went from having the biggest trade surplus in history to the biggest trade debt in history in only one generation.

Borrowing and debt replaced production as the basis for economic prosperity. Debt bridged the gap between stagnating wages and a middle-class lifestyle. By 2015, 79 percent of Americans across all ages and political party affiliations believed that it is more common for people to fall out of the middle class than rise up to it. 273 Only thirteen percent of American adults believed that their children would be better off financially than they were when their career reached its peak and just over half believed their children would have less disposable income than they did in the future. 274 Debt created the illusion of upward mobility, even as wages stagnated and jobs were being outsourced around the globe.

In many respects, the last decade of the twentieth century, with the Cold War seemingly won by the West, was an exercise in achieving superiority; the superiority of American innovation, its financial system, its affluence, the average American’s very way of life, even the nation’s military might, over the rest of the world. Individually, our possessions showed our superiority over our neighbors and friends. Our inalienable right to pursue happiness knew no bounds, as long as the cost of money was cheap. Americans 272

Hyman, L. Temp (2018) at p. 255 MacArthur Foundation (2015) 274 Haven Life Research (2015) https://havenlife.com/common/pdf/2015-next-generation-financewellness-report.pdf 273

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identified themselves by brand names as the Internet, once promised to be a tool for civic engagement, became a vast portal of consumption, products, services, information, entertainment and pornography. Yet, there is something oddly undignified, even degrading, about waiting in a line for hours on Black Friday to purchase the latest electronic gadget, toy or article of clothing. Americans once viewed the sight of Russians waiting on long lines to purchase their consumer staples as pathetic. Such occurrences, Americans thought, were evidence of a society in economic and moral decay. YouTube is filled with videos of adults fighting over toys and consumer gadgets. Americans were convinced that the state-controlled Soviet economy had destroyed the human spirit and work ethic of the people. Russians had given up their liberties and freedom for the security of Communism even if it meant the lack of social mobility and the scarcity of consumer goods. Is the tradeoff between personal dignity and mindless consumption in the United States qualitatively different?

Equally discomfiting was consumer behavior during the Pandemic of 2020. Hoarding is a natural human response sometimes rational, sometimes emotional - to scarcity or perceived scarcity. Psychologists believe that a lack of control over one's circumstances and anxiety over uncertainty triggered the physical act of snatching up bundles of toilet paper, aspirin and canned goods. When people started posting images of shoppers stocking up on toilet paper, in particular, it started a consumer stampede.

Believing that we are “doing something� to prevent our fears can give us a false sense of control and temporarily relieve our anxiety. According to one observer, “"We can know rationally that toilet paper will not run out, but we see others doing it, we see empty shelves and pictures of empty 262 | P a g e

shelves, and that response - that herd mentality - takes over.

Cognitively, you can know all day long that there will be plenty of toilet paper, but the scarcity of it can cause fear and anxiety. That can be more powerful than reason." 275 In no small part, the maintenance of democracy and selfgovernance is based on the role and meaning derived from work and the production of something valuable for society, for the greater good. Such work had virtue and was the basis of citizenship. The founders of the republic were well acquainted with the humanist scholars in the Italian Renaissance, Socrates, Aristotle, Cato, Cicero and Augustine and believed in the indispensable role that public virtue would play in the development of the new nation. It meant putting the common good before one’s own interests.

John Adams modeled himself on Cicero as Washington did on Cato. Montesquieu, the Enlightenment theorist who had a greater influence on the founders than any other, famously stated in his Spirit of Laws that virtue was the one indispensable quality in a republic. 276 However, by the time of Tocqueville’s arrival in 1831 he could observe that “democratic peoples hold erudition in very low esteem and care little about what happened in Rome and Athens.” The creed of competition may advance the interests of the winners in the marketplace but during a crisis it my devolve into the Hobbesean state of all against all. Out of self275

Fear, irrational behavior caused toilet paper scare, hoarding. March 30, 2020 https://www.meadvilletribune.com/coronavirus/fearirrational-behavior-caused-toilet-paper-scarehoarding/article_ed338481-7aa3-5b76-b89c-7a2faf2b9e17.html

276

Ricks, T. First Principles (2020).

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preservation, then, we may choose to give up our rights to an absolute protector. Indeed, independent and productive work has been a bulwark against the tyranny of the state. One need only look at the Communist or Fascist states where all property, including labor, is held in common to understand how the absence and deterioration of self-ownership and the ability to make a living undermines freedom, self-ownership and self-government. Or look at the American plantation economy based on slavery and state-sponsored violence by whites against Black people and one will see a police state and the degradation and withering away of liberty, virtue and founding principles among both the rulers and the ruled.

Drones at work may make good consumers but may not make for good citizens. “A republic, if you can keep it, �

Benjamin Franklin’s 1787 quip about the government Americans would have is wisdom still with us.

The mass unemployment of the Great Recession of 20082010 left one in three workers unemployed for more than one year. And while most searched desperately for work, chronic unemployment and the receipt of government assistance has become widespread in the U.S. This absence of human capital from the economy, the depreciation of skills and the loss of productivity, compounded annually, represents an enormous problem for an economy that is in transition from an industrial stage to a knowledge intensive stage. In some economies compulsory labor would be a suitable, if not a short-term prescription, to the problem. In the U.S., however, fashioning a remedy consistent with basic notions of liberty and autonomy has been difficult. As noted, after the Civil War, unemployment was essentially criminalized. Prison labor and tenant farming were a modern form of peonage. During the Great Depression, public work was made available to millions. During the later decades of 264 | P a g e

the twentieth century, unemployment compensation was expanded and welfare for families and dependent children was curtailed in favor of “workfare.� After incarcerating a substantial part of an entire generation of working age Black men, the U.S. imported millions of undocumented workers from Mexico and Central America. Welfare reform and an unprecedented number of legal and illegal immigrants have created a low skilled labor force to serve the middle class, whose wages have stagnated but who can still buy cheap goods from abroad on easy credit as their jobs are being deskilled or eliminated. For nearly two decades, situation has been untenable for most middle class Americans. In 2008, the Pew Research Center survey showed that a growing number of middle-class Americans felt that they weren’t better off than they were five years earlier. Their short-term assessment of personal progress, according to the survey, was the worst it had been in nearly half a century. As various forms of automation take aim at millions of working Americans, the viability of democracy is at stake.

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6. Trust and Engagement Related to open communication is trust; in fact, trust is the foundation of communication. A World Values Survey that assesses basic values and beliefs in more than eighty counties, found that people care as much about fairness as they do about their own pecuniary interests. In commercial transactions, most people care about ethical values. Yet, a Watson Wyatt survey in 2016 indicated that about half the workforce simply didn’t trust their employer. Most of this distrust centered on communication that is perceived as secretive or dishonest. When employees don’t trust managers to make good decisions or to behave with integrity, their motivation is seriously compromised. Their distrust and attendant lack of engagement is a big, often unrecognized problem in many organizations. Of course, the issue has always mattered, but it matters more in organizations that are dependent on the commitment and ideas of employees. Even Google, a company that receives a million resumes a year experiences defections and resorts to poaching the talent of competitors. While some of these departures are the direct result of stock option vesting, the company has begun experimenting with an offsite “skunk works” to counteract the perceptions of cramped communication and secrecy within the larger organizational culture.

A 2016 Gallup survey of the United States workforce indicated a troubling lack of engagement among employed adults. Only 33 percent of employees surveyed felt engaged at work. 16 percent reported that they were actively disengaged, while the remaining 51 percent - the majority of workers – were not engaged. Those employees primarily put in their time and maintain just enough productivity to avoid negative consequences, while putting little energy or passion 266 | P a g e

into their jobs. To make matters worse, few respondents felt that better performance would even lead to faster growth at their organization. 277 Employee disengagement has a negative effect on organizations’ creativity and productivity.

Gallup had found that just 20 percent of “not engaged” and actively disengaged employees felt that their current job “brings out [their] most creative ideas” Only 21 percent of employees in general strongly agreed that their performance was managed in a way that motivates them to do outstanding work.

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Gallup data revealed an unsettling pattern in the U.S. workplace. Employees had little belief in their company’s leadership. The data says: • •

•

22% of employees strongly agreed the leadership of their organization had a clear direction for the organization.

15% of employees strongly agreed the leadership of their organization made them enthusiastic about the future.

13% of employees strongly agreed the leadership of their organization communicated effectively with the rest of the organization. 278

277

Gallup, Inc. (2017). State of the American Workplace 2016.

Retrieved from https://www.gallup.com/workplace/238085/stateamerican-workplace-report-2017.aspx

278

State of the American Workplace (2015) file:///C:/Users/eanj/Documents/Alison/Files/IJMB%20Article/Sources /SOAW_Report_GEN_1216_WEB_FINAL_rj.pdf

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Creating and maintaining productive and meaningful work, then, is critical to our longterm health, happiness and independence. This means that business leaders will need to step up. As we have seen, many people seem to find the work they do unfulfilling. As a result, they are disengaged and less productive than they might be. Leaders can help change that by doing at least two things. First, by making sure that the work that is assigned employees actually serves a purpose or something of value. Second, making sure that employees understand how their own everyday work contributes to that purpose. Even with AI on the horizon, in the near term there is probably no new information technology that will carry productivity to new heights, as the computer has done over the last forty years. The easy efficiencies have been achieved. But even as they are forced to lay off workers, the best companies will need to do more than simply survive during long business slumps, like the COVID-19 recession. The best companies will continue to find ways to invest in those employees who create long-term value. While some employers believe that workers should be content to just have a job, making investments in valueadding employees during down business cycles, when it is most needed, will create big payoffs in the future when business picks up. Any firm, even if mismanaged, can succeed during the good times. Only the best succeeds when the going gets tough. Management requires more than counting time, pointing out mistakes, and disciplining employees.

In The Management Myth, Matthew Stuart ably provides a respective of management fads over the last century, many re-inventing and re-packaging basic humanistic philosophies. 279 One of the more ludicrous management 279

Stewart, M. The Management Myth (2009).

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approaches in the nineteen nighties was to re-socialize the employer – employee relationship and for management to empower employees by treating them like entrepreneurs. Of course, entrepreneurship is the opposite of the American legal framework of master – servant. Entrepreneurs take risks by investing their own or someone else’s capital typically in an untested but promising venture. Not only does the entrepreneur have a risk of loss, importantly she is an equity owner in the business. The owner also owns the business assets, including intellectual property. In contrast, the employee works for a wage and is wholly dependent on the employer for the job. There is no ownership, no prospect of risk of loss or profit. In fact, the very definition of an employee is that the employer controls all of the worker’s actions and is dependent on the employer for the job. This management fad is remarkable not only for its disassociation from reality but also for absurdity of any employer that would actually pay a consultant to foment it.

Stewart concludes that “after 100 years of fruitless attempts to produce a [business management] disciple, it should be clear that it does not exist . . . Managers do not need to be trained; they need to be educated. “ 280 He goes on to explain that management theory is, in fact, a branch of the humanities. As such, a “good manager” is: Someone with a facility for analysis and an even greater talent for synthesis; someone who has an eye both for the details and for the one big thing that really matters; someone who is able to reflect on facts in a disinterested way, who is always dissatisfied with pat answers and the conventional wisdom, and who therefore takes a certain 280

Id at 291 (emphasis in the original)

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pleasure in knowledge itself; someone with a wide knowledge of the world and even a better knowledge of the way people work; someone who knows how to treat people with respect; someone with honesty, integrity, trustworthiness, and the other things that make up good character; someone, in short, who understands oneself and the world around us well enough to know how to make it better. By this definition, of course, a good manger is nothing more or less than a good and well-educated person. 281 Employers that succeed have managers and supervisors that lead from core values, have superior communication skills, and who can tap the reservoir of ingenuity and know-how that exist within the organization. Trust and commitment must be instilled within the organization to avoid hoarding ideas and feet dragging. Since knowledge workers are, in part, intrinsically motivated by core values, the hard work of leadership will be to nurture an open environment where information is freely shared and expectations for performance are transparent. The measure of the leader’s success is not only how well they inspire employees to perform their best, but also to perform at the highest level of trust, sharing and cooperation. Various case studies, whether WorldCom, Enron, BP Petroleum or Wells Fargo, demonstrate at best profound ethical lapses by leaders and an uninspiring work ethic among the workforce. At worst, the cultures in these organizations perpetuated egregious fraud and criminality. Exceptional leadership at all levels, public and private, is needed. In short, the U.S. has reached an existential moment, a tipping point, which requires a breakthrough not only in technical expertise but ethical 281

Id at 303.

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leadership at all levels. To create a climate in which employees contribute their creativity and expertise, leaders need to develop collaboration, communication and conflict resolution skills and manage at the highest levels of integrity.

Decision-making must be fair and ethical. Trust and commitment must be instilled within the team and across teams to avoid hoarding of ideas. Meaningful work must be rewarded externally with good pay and benefits and motivated intrinsically from within just as much, perhaps more, than by a paycheck. Managing within this social context is not a passive exercise. It requires discipline, continuous effort and a will to excel.

Naturally, technology companies believe in a data based solution. In 2014, Google’s first ever diversity report, revealed that only two percent of its staff were Black and three percent Hispanic. In response, of course, an algorithm was created to screen candidates and to facilitate hiring decisions ordinarily made by humans. Other companies have used software based on collecting behavioral information using a survey, then making a predictive model based on top performers. They then hire based on how candidates match up with those top performers. “What a systematic process does is it knows no color, no race, no ethnicity,” says Jason Taylor, chief scientist for human capital management at Infor Talent Science, the firm that provides the software. 282 “When [a hiring manager] doesn't know a person and they don't know what to look for, they basically hire people like themselves. It's ‘We have something in common,’ or ‘Oh, I like you,’ then it's ‘Okay you're hired.’ What this does is it provides them with an objective piece of information that shows the probability that 282

The Atlantic June 2015 https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/06/algorithmhiring-diversity-HR/396374/

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they're going to be successful in the role. So, it helps to qualify that pool,� he adds. 283 However, the very act of differentiating high performers from low performers can reflect subjective bias, which has been a notorious source of discrimination within workplaces. In Short, if the underlying performance data is contaminated by discrimination, the software enabled hiring will merely perpetuate it. 284 Therefore, software and algorithmic hiring is not a substitute for ethical leadership.

Managers of knowledge and creative workers, in particular, often don't understand how best to manage their staff because ethical behavior is often not critical to the relationship. Firms that want to maximize the fullest potential of their workers must have effective collaborative environments - the best work is produced by means of teamwork, not by individual careerists and bureaucrats sharing of information - knowledge workers are listened to, trusted, and know what is going on - loose hierarchies managers serve their staffs, not dominate them- and devolution of decision making - knowledge workers are trusted and trained to make decisions where the value is created—at the frontline. These environments tend to drive commitment and behaviors far beyond what could ever be written into a job description. Many traditional management techniques are not effective when dealing with work that is largely intellectual. In a knowledge-intensive organization, the role of management changes. Management becomes less about setting and policing rules for workers and more about 283

Id. Harvard Business Review May 2018 https://hbr.org/2019/05/allthe-ways-hiring-algorithms-can-introduce-bias?registration=success 284

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establishing strategy, setting goals, showing leadership, and measuring results. Knowledge management is less about managing people and more about giving them the right goals, the right motivation, and the right tools, and clearly articulating how success or failure will be measured.

Accessing the higher levels of human creativity and meaning on the job requires a sea change in thinking: a new mindset, a new skill set, a new toolset -- in short, a whole new habit.

A recent Hewitt Associates survey of employees cited twenty eight attributes that they felt were important for their supervisors to have. The top five attributes were Honesty (which is not only avoiding the scapegoating of employees but also includes knowing when the supervisor is part of the problem); Integrity (which means being invested in the success of others and not hoarding information for personal advantage); Caring (which means understanding that most employees experience some difficulty balancing the demand of work with family responsibilities); Fairness (which means letting employees know what’s expected and having an ethical foundation for the use of discipline; and Approachability (which means making the extra effort to maintain positive relationships and active listening). In short, supervisors in knowledge-intensive organizations must be leaders. 285

285

See Klitgaard, K. The Struggle for Meaningful Work. February 2017 for an insightful discussion of craftsmanship and “caring labor.” https://greattransition.org/publication/meaningfulwork?gclid=Cj 0KCQiAqo3-BRDoARIsAE5vnaJU73rliI_2TgVzFiccIzSO8UDZW6UHinmEV39n4UVt1ZiL6ZCH7YaAtPNEALw_wcB

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For most organizations, supervisors have no incentive to be leaders, that is, despite the corporate party line, management has no interest in supervision based on core values. The primary values for these organizations, many of which are competing globally, are efficiency, productivity, the elimination of waste, and reducing idleness. The primary role of the supervisor is to count time, apply procedures, and to justify discipline or discharge decisions in a welldocumented fashion. Since the exclusive focus is on production, supervisory training tends to cover how to follow the rules consistently and to avoid being abusive. In contrast, supervisory training to foster meaning at work focuses on communication skills, conflict resolution, and the exercise of what Richard Florida terms “soft power.” Soft power is the ability to get what you want by attracting and persuading others to adopt your goals. However, without acting from a core set of values, soft power is often an exercise in manipulation and deception. Thus, all supervisory training in knowledge intensive environments starts with the clarification of individual and corporate values.

Many codes of conduct, ethics trainings, and compliance programs are ineffective, however, when organizations’ values are highly deterministic and material. Executive leaders may use power, fear and intimidation to lead and view autonomous individuals with high self-esteem as threats to their organizations’ missions.

To create an environment of trust, sharing, and integrity, leaders must target barriers in their organizations that prevent employees from performing well and feeling satisfied at work. Studies point to the pervasiveness of ethical issues in the workplace. A 2013 National Business Ethics Survey of the United States Workforce found that 41 274 | P a g e

percent of workers observed misconduct on the job. 60 percent of this misconduct involved people with managerial authority, and workers reported that 21 percent of misconduct was ongoing in their organization. Of the types of misconduct most observed, 18 percent of respondents reported abusive behavior that creates a hostile work environment, 10 percent reported co-workers misreporting hours worked, and 17 percent witnessed lying to employees.

Alarmingly, 21 percent of employees who reported misconduct said they experienced retaliation. 286 Retaliation rates are even higher for employees who report workplace mistreatment and harassment. One 2003 study found that 75 percent of employees who reported such misconduct experienced retaliation. 287 Fear of retaliation and suspicion of supervisory misconduct can dissuade employees from feeling speaking up.

Employees’ lack of engagement contributes to a lack of reporting misconduct and can also impact organizations’ productivity. In 2016, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission issued the Select Task Force on the Study of Harassment in the Workplace, which concluded that 286

Ethics Resource Center. (2014). National Business Ethics Survey of the U.S. Workforce. Retrieved from https://www.ibe.org.uk/userassets/surveys/nbes2013.pdf

287

Cortina, L. M., & Magley, V. J. (2003). Raising voice, risking retaliation: Events following interpersonal mistreatment in the workplace. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 8(4), 247–265. https://doi.org/10.1037/1076-8998.8.4.247

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“employees who experience harassment fail to report the behavior or to file a complaint because they anticipate and fear a number of reactions - disbelief of their claim; inaction on their claim; receipt of blame for causing the offending actions; social retaliation (including humiliation and ostracism); and professional retaliation, such as damage to their career and reputation.” 288 The fears that stop most employees from reporting harassment are well-founded. One 2003 study found that 75 percent of employees who spoke out against workplace mistreatment faced some form of retaliation. Other studies have found that sexual harassment reporting is often followed by organizational indifference or trivialization of the harassment complaint as well as hostility and reprisals against the employee reporting the harassment. Such responses understandably harm the employee in terms of adverse job repercussions and psychological distress.

According to the Task Force “Workplace culture has the greatest impact on allowing harassment to flourish, or conversely, in preventing harassment. The importance of leadership cannot be overstated - effective harassment prevention efforts, and workplace culture in which harassment is not tolerated, must start with and involve the highest level of management of the company.”

To ensure that employees are motivated, leaders should create a culture where ideas are freely shared. An organization’s social environment can boost employee engagement and creativity. Leaders have the authority to structure social environments within their organizations with the aims of producing better outcomes. They can further 288

EEOC Select Task Force on the Study of Harassment in the Workplace (2016) https://www.eeoc.gov/select-task-force-studyharassment-workplace

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improve culture by increasing diversity. It is welldocumented that diverse teams outperform homogenous teams. Diverse management teams are also more likely to yield higher-than-average financial returns, more carefully consider facts, make sound business decisions, and innovate.

289

289

Rock, D., & Grant, H. November 4, 2016. Why Diverse Teams Are Smarter. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2016/11/whydiverse-teams-are-smarter; Boston Consulting Group January 23,

2018 How Diverse Teams Boost Innovation https://www.bcg.com/en-us/publications/2018/how-diverseleadership-teams-boost-innovation

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7. Work and Health In 1973, the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare ( now the Department of Health and Human Services) produced a landmark report on work in America.

290 Finding great dissatisfaction on the job, particularly with lower wage, routine jobs, the report found that the way jobs are designed and the way that workers were expected to perform their jobs, was literally making millions of workers sick and killing tens of thousands per year. Health care costs were astronomical, not to mention the hundreds of millions of dollars lost on productivity and the economic and psychological impact on families and communities. In particular, undue stress at work was closely correlated with physical and mental illness, chronic disease and shortened lifespans.

The report documented how dull and demeaning work on the shop floor and in bureaucratic offices, work over which the worker had little or no control, contributed to an assortment of physical and mental problems. The factors correlating with these problems were low status, little autonomy, rapid technological change, isolation on the job, role conflict, role ambiguity, and threats to self-esteem inherent in the appraisal system. 291 In particular. Job dissatisfaction and low self-esteem was directly correlated with stress-induced heart disease. 292 Among factors contributing to depression and anxiety were feelings of helplessness on the job and the apathy that is derived from limiting one’s aspirations and 290

Work in America: Report of a Special Task Force to the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare (1973) 291 Id. 82 292 Id. 79-80

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lack of mobility. 293 In response, alcoholism and drug use were rampant. The report also found increased suicide rates, particularly among white men. 294 Nearly fifty years later, wife and husband economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton published Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism. 295 A New York Times Notable Book in 2020, the book purportedly set forth ground breaking research establishing two decades of deaths by primarily white men of prime working years from suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholism. According to the authors, “For the white working class, today’s America has become a land of broken families and few prospects. As the college educated become healthier and wealthier, adults without a degree are literally dying from pain and despair.” What Case and Deaton “uncovered” was evidence of work-life deterioration for a new generation of commentators and casual readers. That. In fact, had been documented at least a half-century before. I have discussed in detail the events that have had the biggest impacts on American work-life particularly during the time the H.E.W. Task Force report was issued in 1973 to the end of the century. It is a story of deindustrialization, the emergence of a global economy, new technologies, the expansion of the service economy, massive worker displacement and the stagnation of wages. None of this was preordained: rather it is the continuing result of policies dictated mostly by corporations and concentrated capital. Likewise, the relentless drive to obliterate the 293 294

Id. 84 Id. 86

295

Case, A. & Deaton, A . Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (2020

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employer-employee relationship with freelance and gig work has reduced millions to economic insecurity.

Promoted as a liberating lifestyle, particularly to young people, freelance and gig work has become the most exploitive work of all.

During the nineteen nineties, the so-called culture wars, consumer consumption and the phony prosperity that ensued proved ample distractions for Americans as millions of jobs were offshored and the income gap grew wider and wider.

As I have noted here, nearly and entire generation of Black men in their prime working years were incarcerated as their white counterparts were left to self-destruction. What Case and Deaton have done, quit ably, is to restate and reinterpret the ongoing impact of an entirely inhumane American market economy.

Significantly, the keystone of the H.E.W. Task Force report was the redesign of jobs to improve the quality of life for millions of Americans at all occupational levels, to give a voice to many workers in the decision-making process.

What has happened since the report, however, is precisely the opposite for most workers. Software, algorithms and increasingly Artificial Intelligence tools have de-skilled and standardized many jobs. This process, as I have shown, has been one of the core features of industrialization. This process, too, is proclaimed as preordained, not subject to democratic intervention. Like the industrial worker that was ruled by the machine and the clock, many of today’s workers are ruled by ever more sophisticated machine’s, machines that supposedly can learn, and a surveillance system that tracks every key stroke and movement within the workplace.

And for many workers, the level of stress is at unhealthy levels. The COVID-19 pandemic has crystalized not only 280 | P a g e

the job market’s inherent inequities but also how many jobs, particularly jobs deemed essential, are inimical to human health and welfare. In short, for many in America, work continues to make them sick, leading to shorter lives.

For freelancers isolation, financial pressures, irregular hours, lack of supervision and unrealistic turn-around times results in undue stress, anxiety and depression. Achieving any kind of work-life balance is enormously difficult with irregular workloads and abusive clients. First-class promoters like Daniel Pink extol this so-called free agent archetype. 296 Like other promoters of the so-called new work bargain, Pink is obsessed with flipping Marx on his head, arguing that since freelancers own the means of preproduction, they are essentially the paragon of a mature and more equitable capitalism. “Today, individuals hold in their hand the same kind of computing and communications power that entire organizations had 30 years ago. This has radically changed the power equation. There is a bit of a Marxist revenge here.

Workers now own their own means of production,” he glibly says. 297 In reality, most freelancers bid against a global labor pool and are driven down to subsistence wages.

Freelance and gig work are basically social Darwinism, pure and simple, gussied-up in newfangled buzz words for the new economy. Such work represents the worst features of a “new economy” that treats workers as interchangeable parts in the production process, without security or healthcare, not even the opportunity for unemployment or disability insurance. The average freelancer or gig worker today is no 296

Pink, D. Free Agent Nation (2001).

Workforce interview July 2012 https://www.workforce.com/news/dan-pink-interview-free-agentnation-evolves 297

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better off that the displaced craft worker of the nineteenth century.

The triumphalism that greeted the end of the Cold War has crashed on the shores of massive inequality and brutality comparable to what existed during the Gilded Age. Arguably, that inequality moderated only because of two cataclysmic world wars separated by a brutal economic depression. Today, however, the richest ten percent of Americans take home forty-eight percent of all domestic income. So-called free agent work is at least partially responsible for this inequality. People need a secure economic order to feel safe. Deprived of that, people feel cynicism and distrust, alienation and anomie, which tears at the fabric of democracy. The work-life of the average American today is filled with as much, insecurity, stress and anxiety as the worker of a century ago.

In 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) added “burn-out” in its International Classification of Diseases Handbook. According to the Handbook burn-out is a syndrome resulting from "chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed." The Mayo Clinic says that job burn-out can result from various factors, including an inability to influence decisions that affect the job, unclear job expectations, dysfunctional workplace dynamics. lack of social support and isolation at work, and work-life imbalance.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exponentially increased the stress levels for many employees and employers alike.

Shortages of protective equipment, long shifts, and fear of taking the virus home to their families, these are just some of the challenges facing health professionals supporting the COVID-19 response. A frontline nurse’s survey taken by 282 | P a g e

the Service Employees International Union indicated urgent need for greater protection for patients, caregivers, and communities. 298 Four registered nurses working in hospitals in New York City shared their thoughts on behalf of nurses on the front lines: There are refrigerator trucks filled with bodies outside our hospitals. Many of us have to pass by them when we go into work, knowing that among those bodies are the patients we cared for yesterday and when we leave 12 hours later, some of the patients we cared for today will join them. Even harder to handle is the knowledge that among those bodies may be a colleague or friend, fellow nurses who caught COVID-19 while caring for others. It is heartbreaking and terrifying because we know that we too could end up in a body bag shelved in a refrigerator truck.

We try to find time to hold our patients’ hands because we know family members cannot. Some of us pin a picture of ourselves to our gown so patients can have a connection to a real person, not just the muffled voice of a faceless clinician behind a mask, covered head to toe in personal protective equipment (PPE). PPE that is still in short supply. Yes, now we may get a new N95 for each 12-hour shift, but that is still far from the best practice 298

https://www.seiu.org/blog/2020/4/frontline-nurses-surveyalarming-findings

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of a new one for each patient. And it’s getting harder and harder to provide good care. As more nurses are getting sick, we are working even more short-staffed. Sometimes we can’t provide basic care - the measures that are so important to ensure dignity and comfort for every patient. 299 Four months into the pandemic, the American Nurses Foundation found half of the 10,000 nurses surveyed said that they felt overwhelmed, and nearly 30 percent said they were experiencing feelings of depression. Three of four nurses said they are suffering from challenges with sleep, either excessive sleep or sleeplessness. 300 The survey also revealed that only three percent of nurses believed that their Employee Assistance Programs had been a helpful resource for mental health and wellbeing.

Parents, especially moms, are experiencing negative health impacts due to the stress and worry sparked by COVID-19, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. With uncertainties about health and safety conditions at school, the monthly tracking poll shows that at least one-fourth of parents with children who normally attend school say that worry and stress related to coronavirus has had a “major” negative impact on their mental health - 35 percent of mothers versus 26 percent of fathers.

299

Off the Charts: Frontline Workers Speak Out https://ajnoffthecharts.com/a-message-from-frontline-nurses-letskeep-the-real-enemy-in-sight/ 300

American Foundation of Nurses July 2020 https://www.nursingworld.org/news/news-releases/2020/new-pulseon-the-nations-nurses-survey-series-half-of-frontline-nursesemotionally-overwhelmed-by-covid-19/

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Furthermore, when asked whether they have experienced specific adverse effects due to worry and stress related to coronavirus, mothers in particular reported struggling with several signs of anxiety and stress. Mothers reported sleep disturbances – 53 percent - poor appetite or overeating – 46 percent - headaches or stomach aches -32 percent - difficulty controlling their temper – 25 percent - worsening chronic conditions -18% - and increasing alcohol or drug use – 14 percent. All told, 69 percent of moms and 51 percent of dads reported experiencing one or more of these conditions.

Seven in 10 parents said they worry that their child could get COVID-19 at school. But parents also had worries about remote learning at home, and their concerns show the interconnection of education and other social determinants of health. Parents’ top worries about continued athome learning included the impact on their children’s academic, emotional and social development; the potential they could lose income if they can’t work outside the home; the loss of access to social services for their children through school; not having the technology needed for at-home learning; and their children not having enough to eat.

The expectation of long hours at the office has been particularly hard on parents – especially mothers. Hit hard by job losses and the pandemic’s effect on schooling and childcare, American women face short-term difficulties and long-term repercussions. The pandemic is not just pushing women out of jobs they held, but also preventing many from seeking new ones. For a working mother, it could limit prospects and earnings over a lifetime. Across a nation, it

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could stunt growth, robbing the economy of educated, experienced and dedicated workers. 301 How America’s essential workers will be rewarded after the pandemic recedes will be one of the great issues of the next decade. From wages to healthcare, to labor organizing and much will be on the table.

Consider the working conditions at Amazon, one of the nation’s biggest employers. The company has added 427,300 employees in ten months during 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, average of 1,400 new workers a day, bringing its global work force to more than 1.2 million. 302 301

New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/17/business/economy/womenjobs-economyrecession.html?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage 302 NY Times, Nov. 27, 2020 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/27/technology/pushed-bypandemic-amazon-goes-on-a-hiring-spree-withoutequal.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

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In 2018, the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre claimed the company was engaging in "aggressive antiunion tactics" after a 45-minute video produced by Amazon and sent to Team Leaders of the Amazon-owned grocery chain Whole Foods was leaked. The video contained six sections, which the narrator states are “specifically designed to give you the tools that you need for success when it comes to labor organizing.” 303 “We are not anti-union, but we are not neutral either,” the video states. “We do not believe unions are in the best interest of our customers, our shareholders, or most importantly, our associates. Our business model is built upon speed, innovation, and customer obsession—things that are generally not associated with union. When we lose sight of those critical focus areas we jeopardize everyone’s job security: yours, mine, and the associates.”

In 2019, Amazon responded: Workers must not be penalized or subjected to harassment or intimidation for the nonviolent exercise of their right to join or refrain from joining such legal organizations. We have works councils, statutory employee representation obligations, and union agreements in certain countries outside the United States and at certain of our studio operations within the United States. We 303

Business & Human Rights Resource Centre https://www.businesshumanrights.org/en/latest-news/usa-amazon-accused-of-aggressiveanti-union-tactics-after-training-video-is-leaked-incl-amazonsresponse-whole-worker-rejoinder/

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consider our employee relations to be good.

304

However, significant advances in technology have greatly expanded the capability, severity, methodology, frequency, and precision of employer surveillance of employees who want to organize a union. Frequent reports indicate that Amazon’s relationship with many of its employees consists of control, humiliation, and unabating anxiety. 305 Amazon uses its surveillance infrastructure to control and monitor the output and behavior of its employees. Upon entering the warehouse, Amazon requires workers to dispose of all of their personal belongings except a water bottle and a clear plastic bag of cash. During the workday, Amazon surveils warehouse employees with an extensive network of security cameras that tracks and monitors a worker’s every move, ostensibly to track worker productivity and deter theft.

Systems that track the amount of time workers are ‘off task’ are used to strictly control their physical movements and issue warnings and eventually discharge notices. “You’re being tracked by a computer the entire time you’re there.

You don’t get reported or written up by managers. You get written up by an algorithm,” says an Amazon warehouse worker. “You’re keenly aware there is an algorithm keeping track of you, making sure you keep going as fast as you can, because if there is too much time elapsed between items, the 304

Id. Haney, D. & Hubbard, S. (2018) Eyes Everywhere: Amazon’s Surveillance Infrastructure https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5e449c8c3ef68d752f3e70dc/t/ 5f4cffea23958d79eae1ab23/1598881772432/Amazon_Report_Final.p df 305

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computer will know this, will write you up, and you will get fired.” 306 Workers under pressure to speed up often injure themselves. At least one report found injuries at Amazon warehouses to be three times the national average for warehouses, based on the company’s injury reports to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).

307 A single Baltimore facility fired an estimated 300 of 2,500 full-time workers for failing to meet productivity metrics.

Amazon’s workers are under constant stress to make their quotas for collecting and organizing hundreds of packages per hour. The work culture has been described as a “‘Lord Of The Flies’-esque” environment where the perceived weakest links are culled every year. 308 And the company has 306

The Guardian Feb 2020 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/05/amazonworkers-protest-unsafe-grueling-conditions-warehouse 307 308

Id. Eyes Everywhere: Amazon’s Surveillance Infrastructure

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ambitions to expand its surveillance and control over its workers. It has patented a wristband that “can precisely track where warehouse employees are placing their hands and use vibrations to nudge them in a different direction.” The patent states that “ultrasonic tracking of a worker’s hands may be used to monitor performance of assigned tasks.” 309 Microchips that can be inserted into employees to track their movements, open doors, log onto computers and buy breakroom snacks is also in use. 310 Justified by efficiency and anti-union animus, Amazon has built a totalitarian workplace enabled by firms that produce spyware for authoritarian governments. As observed by Barbara Ehrenreich, for workers who feel that they have no real choice, “one is required to surrender one’s basic civil rights and – what boils down to the same thing – self – respect.” 311 No doubt, a member of the company’s management couldn’t spend a week in one of the warehouses that they have standardized with task directed algorithms.

The workplace culture is as routinized as any created at the height of Taylorism during the era of modern industrialization. The management philosophy, too, is the same as that held by the industrial owners - the sacred, immutable, predetermined march of efficiency and technology that dehumanizes workers and that puts at risk their mental and physical health, beyond the reach of a government, whose primary purpose is to protect and defend the free enterprise system. Indeed, local and state governments compete for an Amazon warehouse because of 309

Id. ABC News Aug 2017 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-0802/microchip-workers-hold-chip-party/8765934 310

311

Ehrenreich, E. Nickel and Dimed (2001) 208

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the chronic unemployment that has destroyed families and whole communities. Even the wage of $15 per hour is pernicious, as it puts the worker out of reach to receive Medicaid health benefits, food and housing assistance in most states. Many of the warehouse jobs depend on family for transportation, carpool or bicycle to work, when possible.

Rents are high. In short, they lack the market leverage that more educated, middle class workers temporarily have.

Their economic condition makes them subservient to their employers.

People line up to apply for a job at an Amazon warehouse.

They do so because, in America, no one is owed a living.

Applying for a job is purely a market transaction. Indeed, some recruiters are increasingly using Artificial Intelligence tools to screen applicants based on data collected about previous or similar applicants, thus dehumanizing and mutating the process further. People work for a living and to experience the dignity that a paycheck brings. The job is merely a means to end and just as the worker is fungible, so is the job. As an interchangeable worker, they do not get much respect from Amazon. It has been found that workers in these lower skilled jobs suffer from significant mental health problems. 312 Workers “adapt by limiting their aspirations and their expectations and that, in effect, the greatest mental health deficit suffered by these workers is lack of involvement in the job and, consequently, lack of self-fulfillment. “ 313 But as individuals, they may be earning the respect of their families’ and their communities.

Through work, they are taking part in human history and 312

Work in America: Report of a Special Task Force to the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare (1973) 82.

313 Id.

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contributing to their culture, such as it is. They do not need anyone’s pity. They do not need the help of government programs, necessarily. What they need is a strong labor union for their own mutual aid and protection and to bargain aggressively with their employer.

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8. The Future of Work Labor today faces a grave crisis, perhaps the most calamitous since it began in the shadows of want and insecurity. In the next twenty years, automation will grind jobs into dust as it grinds out unbelievable volumes of production. This period is made to order for those who would seek to drive labor into impotency by viciously attacking it at every point of weakness. Hardcore unemployment is now and ugly and unavoidable fact of life.

Like malignant cancer, it has grown year by year and continues to spread. But automation can be used to generate an abundance of wealth for people or an abundance of poverty for millions as its humanlike machines turn out human scrap along with machine scrap as a by-product of production. And, I am convinced that our society, with its ability to perform miracles with machinery, has the capacity to make some miracles for men – if it values men as highly as it values machines.

314

So stated, Martin Luther King, Jr in 1961 at the AFL-CIO Fourth Constitutional Convention. The statement is, of course, as relevant today as it was then. In a few short sentences, Reverend Kind encapsulates labor’s beginnings 314

“All Labor Has Dignity” Martin Luther King, Jr. edited by Honey, M. K. (2011) 39

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and how it was demonized, trounced on and pushed out of the workshops and how workers themselves were deskilled and displaced by advancements in technology introduced on the shop floor. He recognizes the current of social, labor and economic history where past is prologue. He explains that a permanent underclass of unemployed workers is not only a social disaster but a direct threat to democracy. More than that, he observes that the denigration of labor is a deliberate policy by the ownership class that has access to political power to achieve their ends. Reverend King offers hope for the future if Americans can grow ethically with its technological prowess, a theme that he had reiterated many times. His ongoing challenge to his audiences was work toward redirecting the power of an inhuman market economy to serve human beings so that they could fulfill their psychological, social and economic needs which requires constant collective action by multiple stakeholders.

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I have outlined here the actions and reactions of the decades that followed King’s speech in 1961 and the overall course of development. Labor unions declined precipitously and automation mercilessly replaced millions of workers.

Reverend King was assassinated at the time he joined a labor strike.

The country descended into violence and degradation, as nearly every industrial center in the country shed its manufacturing jobs, leaving abandoned building and social dysfunction. Prisons warehoused men of prime working age. Mass consumption financed by consumer debt created millions of jobs in the service economy, paying lower wages than manufacturing jobs without unions.

Couples are required to work to maintain a middle class lifestyles, a boon to employers paying most women at least twenty percent less than a man for an equivalent job. Stock market wealth and the appreciation of real estate created a class of servants, mostly undocumented workers. A socalled gig economy now eviscerates job security and has created an exploited and abused class of artisans and craftsmen. For the average worker, wages have stagnated for decades as money remains cheap.

At the same time, information age has created a lot more people who make their living working with ideas, who are professional members of a knowledge class.

The information economy has increasingly rewarded them with money and status. Such information-intensive work is open only a relatively small percentage of educated workers perform it. Since the aptitudes and abstract reasoning skills necessary for value added knowledge work are not equally dispersed throughout the population, employers have traditionally relied on a global labor pool, which work at cheaper wages. While information professionals have been prospering, workers without college degrees have been 295 | P a g e

spiraling down with flatter incomes, decimated families, dissolved communities. As the information economy is placing an awesome premium on information-intense work and devaluing most everything else, including professional, creative, technical and administrative work. While these jobs may not be displaced wholesale, the modularization of many tasks and the enabling power of AI may make even these jobs permanently contingent in nature. In short, the continuing transition from an industrial to information economy creates both promise and peril for the United States. It will depend, as Reverend King and others have said, whether Americans believe in placing human needs at the core of the market economy.

According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia the most in demand jobs prior to the COVID-19 pandemic were Registered Nurse, Tractor/Trailer Truck Driver, Retail Sales Associate, Software Developer/Engineer, Sales Representative Customer Service Representative Retail Store Manager/Supervisor, Office/ Administrative, Assistant Physician and Food Service Team Member. Only one of these jobs were in technology and two were in health care none of these jobs require higher education. 315 About 25 million jobs - 18.2% of the total - in the US are at a high risk of being replaced by automation. The top ten jobs at risk are Cashiers, Office Clerks, General Secretaries and Administrative Assistants, Bookkeeping, Accounting, Auditing Clerks, Receptionists and Information Clerks, Cooks, Landscaping and Groundskeeping Workers, Billing and Posting Clerks, Shipping, Receiving, and Traffic Clerks 315

Presentation at Apprenticeship Summit, March 3, 2020 file:///C:/Users/eanj/AppData/Local/Temp/2020_Mar3_Apprenticeshi pSummit_RT-1.pdf

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and Tellers. These jobs are held disproportionately by women of color. 316 New jobs that may be created by automation may be higher‐ wage jobs than those displaced by automation, such as such as higher end jobs in health care, education, and science industries. Jobs with the lowest risk of automation are First‐ Line Supervisors of Office and Admin. Support Workers, Sales Rep., Wholesale and Manufacturing, Heavy and Tractor‐Trailer Truck Drivers, Maintenance and Repair Workers, General First‐Line Supervisors of Retail Sales Workers, Licensed Practical and Licensed Vocational Nurses, Construction Laborers, Police and Sheriff’s Patrol Officers, Computer User Support Specialists and Automotive Service Technicians and Mechanics. 317 In most metropolitan areas, construction workers are mostly firstgeneration immigrants. Nationalities and trades also tend to go together – Russian masons, Hungarian plumbers, Guyanese electricians and Hungarian floorers. 318 Based on the above scenarios, the divide between college educated workers and those without college educations will increase exponentially within the next decade and continue indefinitely. Moreover, the number of jobs requiring higher learning will actually decrease, accelerating the trend toward college educated workers holding jobs that do not require the degree. Thus, securing meaningful work for Americans in the decades ahead is surely one of the most pressing

316

Id. Id. 318 Bilger, B. The Art of Building the Impossible The New Yorker Nov. 30, 2020 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/11/30/the-artof-building-the-impossible 317

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domestic challenges. Some important bipartisan public policies hold promise.

Expanding Apprenticeships Job training in America has often been ineffective, with programs shaped by local institutional needs and money spent according to the number of people in courses rather than hiring outcomes. However, we may have a once in a generation opportunity to create a truly responsive workforce training system by broadening apprenticeship opportunities that are attuned to hiring demands of the private sector.

For example, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, global supply chains may consolidate, and in some cases America might see a repatriation of manufacturing in certain industries, for instance in pharmaceuticals or high-tech machinery. Before the pandemic, the emphasis was on “just-in-time” production, with parts being delivered just when they were needed in the manufacturing process. In the post-pandemic economy, the emphasis could shift to “just-in-case” supply chains, emphasizing proximity and certainty of delivery.

Metropolitan regions represent big world markets and may be well positioned to maximize its potential in manufacturing, if it can ensure a pipeline of skilled workers.

However, in both skills training and technological innovation, U.S. policies to support manufacturing have not matched the sector’s evolution from one dominated by massive, vertically-integrated companies to a more distributed mix of small, medium, and large firms. As documented by the Brookings Institution other advanced nations have done a better job of addressing the challenges

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that inhibit manufacturing competitiveness. 319 Germany is an oft-cited example of an advanced economy that has been able to sustain manufacturing as a relevant source of employment, growth, and exports. Manufacturing in Germany accounts for 20 percent of employment, nearly twice the share as in the United States, and generates 22 percent of national GDP and 82 percent of total goods exports. German manufacturing succeeds in the global marketplace even as the sector pays higher average wages than in the United States.

In particular, the German dual-education apprenticeship model is considered one of the best apprenticeship models in the world.

There are as many students attending apprenticeship programs as there are at four-year colleges.

The success of the German model is based on quality and regulatory standards; curricula and mandatory assessments are industry specific and designed to ensure labor market transition.

Apprenticeship enables an employer to provide training and instruction according to an employer’s specific needs and to prepare employees for positions that are difficult to fill or will be vacated by retiring workers. These are often critical “middle skill” jobs that are the mainstay of business and industry, not requiring a four-year college degree. It’s a way to transmit cultural and institutional knowledge from experienced workers and to develop employees who will be the mainstay of the future. Apprenticeship can provide employers with a pipeline of talent and increases employee retention and promotes diversity. At the same time, 319

Brookings Institution Feb, 2015 https://www.brookings.edu/research/skills-and-innovation-strategiesto-strengthen-manufacturing-lessons-from-germany/

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apprenticeship provides job seekers with a structured career pathway that enables them to simultaneously earn money and learn skills.

At this inflection moment in history, lawmakers from both major parties have supported apprenticeships as offering a path to higher-paying and meaningful work. Before the pandemic, around 633,000 apprentices were enrolled in programs in the U.S. Heavy and tractor-trailer truck drivers, construction laborers, and carpenters lead the list of most popular registered apprenticeships. In comparison, although having a population approximately a quarter of that of the U.S., Germany had 1.7 million enrolled apprentices in 2019.

Many German C-level executives started their careers as an apprentice, and high respect is accorded to professionals who experienced the shop floor as well as the corner office.

The apprenticeship system in Germany is heavily regulated and institutionalized within the economic culture.

Vocational schools are highly regarded. Programs follow the same structure, which has a regular duration of at least three years and have an assessment requirement. Certification for most middle-skill occupations or trades can be only obtained through a registered apprenticeship. As a percentage of economic activity, Germany spends about six times more than the United States on apprenticeships.

In contrast, the U.S. system is decentralized and funding is fragmented. The U.S, Department of Labor acts as a central registry and works with the business community to ensure that the public system of state and local work force boards, which receive federal funding, are attuned to hiring demands of the private sector. Historically, public two-year community colleges are already central to the nation’s career and technical education system, granting hundreds of 300 | P a g e

thousands of occupationally oriented certificates and technically focused associate degrees. Many community college leaders have welcomed the administration’s call for apprenticeship programs. However, to the American Enterprise Institute, community colleges face cultural, organizational, and financial challenges in delivering and expanding apprenticeships, including developing relationships with employers and registering programs. 320 But working with industry, role community colleges as recruiters of potential apprentices is critical.

Apprenticeships can form the foundation of middle-skill jobs, which are the backbone of the strong German economy. Germany’s success in apprenticeships is based on two key factors: first, industry involvement in training 320

AEI May, 2017 https://www.aei.org/researchproducts/report/apprenticeships-and-community-colleges-do-theyhave-a-future-together/

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ensures quality rather than quantity of apprenticeship programs; second, employers invest directly in a talent pipeline are willing to train workers for their future needs.

In contrast, we are finding that many of our regional employers do not have well-developed internal systems to find and develop talent. Human resources operations are often more operational than strategic, focusing on payroll, on-boarding, and compliance. Employers, particularly small and mid-sized employers, do not always have the capacity to identify current and future skill needs, target their recruitment efforts more strategically, or carry out succession planning. Moreover, the benefits of apprenticeship are not always clear to employers, or at least may seem abstract compared to the up-front work of creating such a program.

While the United States cannot recreate the German apprenticeship system, we can learn from the German model to improve the U.S. system. It is our view that when employers plan to achieve their talent management objectives, rather than simply react to internal hiring demands, they become indispensable partners in meeting ambitious win-win apprenticeship outcomes. Based on experience and practice, the best and most cost-effective way for apprenticeships to become a viable talent management option for small and medium sized businesses is in partnership with a community college as an affordable investment to develop a pipeline of skilled workers and a talent management strategy for their business At a minimum, a post-COVID apprenticeship program would:

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• •

• • • •

Encourage an employer or an employer consortia to create a partnership with a community college; Enable the employer or employer consortia to develop the training curricula and duration of the program (typically two-years at full time status) to meet industry needs and to register the apprenticeship; Integrate the core on-the-job training of apprenticeship programs with traditional course offerings; Enable the student to attend community college free of charge, as long as standards are met; Require the employer to train and pay the apprentice; and Require an examination/assessment at the end of the apprenticeship that would be recognized as an industry standard and portable.

When all relevant parties invest their time and money, it will more likely than not maximize successful outcomes, as they will work hard for a return on their investment. For an employer, the investment in an apprentice is significant, especially in the United States that does not offer tuition-free education, although many students are eligible for financial aid. However, evidence supports the fact that the typical business soon begins to receive value in return when the apprentice begins to do a real job. Moreover, there are other long-term benefits that firms realize from their apprenticeship programs, including reduced recruiting costs, a more predictable and reliable supply of skilled labor, improved employee retention, and improved employee productivity.

While community colleges are primarily degree-granting institutions, they can be made flexible enough to manage apprenticeship programs, granting academic credits to active 303 | P a g e

apprentices and acting as direct training providers.

Importantly, as matriculated college students, mental health, wellness and nutrition counseling are available on campus to apprentices, as well as food and diet support and access to campus physical fitness facilities.

Fostering Microenterprise The current unemployment system promotes the acceptance of cash benefits in exchange for looking for jobs that increasingly do not exist. Even with a favorable business cycle, systemic changes in the economy have left millions of Americans under employed. To help more Americans to live productive and meaningful lives in the post COVID-19 economy, the unemployment system could be reformed to promote microenterprise.

States do a good job delivering checks to the unemployed during down economic cycles, but the current system is still designed for a time when manufacturing employed a majority of the workforce. To date, attempts at re-training the unemployed have been modest. In 1998, Congress authorized the states to use unemployment trust funds to promote self-employment but the states have been illequipped to implement microenterprise programs. Yet, studies from similar programs in seventeen countries in Europe suggest that if self-employed programs in the United States reached one or two percent of unemployment beneficiaries, it could yield 50,000 – 100,000 business startups annually.

In fact, the European Union has expanded its microenterprise programs to include micro lending Microloans, a lifeline usually associated with the world’s poorest countries, are growing across Europe. Aided by 304 | P a g e

government subsidies, their volume in Europe rose by 31%, to €1.05 billion, from 2008 – 2011. The number of new loans more than doubled to 204,080 during that period. In short, micro lending has increased with unemployment, presenting viable alternatives for individuals who choose the freedom of enterprise over the dependence of the dole.

All across Africa too, young entrepreneurs are creating small businesses across the continent giving hope to a new generation for economic and social development. And we are not talking about low tech ventures; rather these are businesses using highly scalable technologies.

Research demonstrates that most Americans would choose meaningful enterprise over unemployment. This is particularly true for Millennials. Millennials are also the first in the modern era to have higher levels of student loan debt, poverty and unemployment, and lower levels of wealth and personal income than their two immediate predecessor generations.

Their difficult economic circumstances in part reflect the impact of the Great Recession of 2009 and, as discussed, in part the longer-term effects of globalization and rapid technological change on the American workforce. The timing of these macro-economic trends has been especially hard on older millennials, many of whom were just entering the workforce in 2007 when the economy sank into a deep recession. Even as the pre-COVID-19 pandemic business cycle looked promising, America’s labor participation rate remained at an all-time low, particularly between people between the ages of 25-45 years of age – the prime working years.

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Fully a third of older millennials, ages twenty-six to thirtythree, have a four-year college degree or more, making them the best-educated cohort of young adults in American history. Educational attainment is highly correlated with economic success, even more so for this generation than previous ones.

However, this new generation of college graduates also has their own economic burdens. They are entering adulthood with record levels of student debt: Two-thirds of recent bachelor’s degree recipients have outstanding student loans, with an average debt of about $27,000. Two decades ago, only half of recent graduates had college debt, and the average was $15,000.

Not every unemployed worker or recent college graduate is suited to start a micro-business, but many are. Traditional unemployment benefits will remain an important part of the safety net. But a portion of the unemployment trust fund could be allocated to promote alternatives. Should states want to participate in such a program, they would be required to amend their Workforce Development Plans, which would include coordinating with community colleges as they do now and design their own programs within guideless established by the U.S. Department of Labor. It is more likely than not, that the promotion of microenterprise would be embraced across the aisle. With bi-partisan leadership, Americans may embrace a program of microenterprise as it fulfills the aspirations of both free enterprise and social welfare.

Encouraging Labor Organizing The national labor law requires substantial reform. As noted, when the Obama Administration attempted to level the 306 | P a g e

playing field between management and labor, it unlashed a firestorm of extremism, just as union organizing had done in the past. Arguable, this extremism may lead to the longterm demise of the Republican Party. Once the party of high wages, international trade and robust immigration, its middle has imploded. This process no doubt started with the Tea Party and Birthers, both funded by wealthy individuals, that provided the vitriolic opposition during the Obama reign.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, millions of Americans were put at risk and many thousands probably died due to the resistance, sometimes armed, of COVID-19 deniers.

Should the Republican Party fracture under the strain of extremism, there will be an opportunity to reintroduce the Employee Free Choice Act. Freedom for Freelancers Additionally, one of America’s most exploited class of workers, freelancers, gig and other platform workers must be at the center of any worker protection reform. Affordable healthcare is a priority. It is foreseeable that the death toll caused by COVID-19 and the disaster of lost health coverage during the recession will create an opportunity to initiate a national plan separate from employer-provided coverage which is subsidized for employers and employees alike through the tax code. Moreover, these workers need the same wage protections and wage insurance as employees. During the pandemic induced economic crisis in 2020, unemployment insurance was provided for the first time to independent contractors, gig workers and selfemployed persons and provided a lifeline to the country’s most vulnerable workers. The sham of free agency having been exposed, the expanded unemployment legislation has proven to be both just and justified.

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The centuries old master-servant law where labor is exchanged for a paycheck, do not lend itself to free agency.

Likewise, the work-for-hire doctrine not only demotivates employees it puts freelancers at a great disadvantage. As we have seen, the appropriation of craft knowledge into trade secrets codified Taylorism into common law, as courts expanded the definition of intellectual property and the use of non-compete agreements to protect employer control over proprietary knowledge gained by workers on the job and which was once considered an attribute of skilled craft workers and regulated by guilds or other associations.

Freelancers, particularly creative workers, are subject to these same rules. In other words, they are not employees subject to the security of paycheck protection laws but still work for hire as if they are employees. The monopolization of their ideas, concepts and designs by employers restricts their ability to pursue other projects. If the freelancer objects to these oppressive terms they are not reattained. If she seeks leverage her knowledge for another projects she is sued for breach of contract and misappropriation. In short, the wok for hire doctrine should be abolished for freelancers.

Raise Wages The conventional free enterprise wisdom holds that productivity growth is the only route to higher wages.

However, as we have seen, over the past four decades, American workers have suffered a devastating loss of economic power in lower wages. The annual economic output of the United States has almost tripled but the gains have gone mostly to upper income earners. If income had kept pace with overall economic growth since 1970, Americans in the bottom 90 percent of the income distribution would be making an extra $12,000 per year on 308 | P a g e

average. In effect, every American worker in the bottom 90 percent of the income distribution is sending an annual check for $12,000 to a more affluent person in the top 10 percent.

321 This income redistribution from lower to hire paid workers has been the result of public policies from both sides of the aisle. As noted, fiscal policy has facilitated debt spending to make up the difference. Thus, the average American worker labors for an ever decreasing wage and an ever higher indebtedness, with no way up and no way out.

This divergence in economic situation has torn at the fabric of basic American values of equality of opportunity as higher earning Americans live in isolation from lower income Americans, making it harder for them to imagine themselves as members of a broader community. Their companies derive a growing share of profits from other countries, which makes it easier to ignore the welfare of American workers.

Some large employers like Walmart and Amazon have raised their minimum wage to $15 per hour, just enough, as mentioned, to make employees ineligible for needed health care in most states. Employers say they will respond to any wage hike by increasing automation and laying off workers, holding regulators and policy makers hostage. Yet, these same employees receive enormous subsidies from government. Donald Bartlett and James Steele have documented, American companies get government money to advertise their products; to help build new plants, offices and stores; and to train their workers. They sell their products to foreign buyers that make the acquisitions with 321

The Jobs We Need NY Times, June 24, 2020 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/opinion/sunday/incomewealth-inequalityamerica.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article

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tax dollars supplied by the U.S. government; engage in foreign transactions that are insured by the government; and are excused from paying a portion of their income tax if they sell products overseas. They receive lucrative government contracts to carry out ordinary business operations, and government grants to conduct research that improve their profit margins. They are extended partial tax immunity if they locate in certain geographical areas, and they may write off as business expenses some of the perks enjoyed by their top executives. 322 All of this costs the average worker two weeks of pay per year.

Policies that suppress wages and subsidizes employers amounts to perverse economics having broad implications for the U.S. economy. The policies keep job seekers out of the market and reduces incentives for employers to increase worker skills, thus perpetuating the low income syndrome.

Without fully using its resources, the American economy limits its capacity for growth. At this tipping point, it is now critical that America focus on wage growth as an organizing principle for public policy for the next decades of the twenty first century. Increasing the federal minimum wage is a start. Beyond that, corporations that receive subsidies from federal and state governments should demonstrate that they are paying a living wage to workers, based on their localities, as a condition of receiving those benefits.

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Corporate Welfare Time Magazine Nov, 9, 1998 https://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/time/1998/11/02/corp.welfare.ht ml

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Comparable Worth The federal Equal Pay Act, which is part of the Fair Labor Standards Act, prohibits sex-based wage discrimination between men and women in the same establishment who perform jobs that require substantially equal skill, effort and responsibility under similar working conditions. in 2009 President Obama signed the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which in effect overruled a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court decision and extended the statute of limitations for filing a suit for unequal or discriminatory pay. As a practical matter, the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act has required employers to keep pay records for years after an employee has left employment. As employees are free to file charges and lawsuits, employers are permitted to defend themselves of such allegations. Suffice to say, litigation in this area of the law is very complex, requiring a sophisticated understanding of burdens of proof, among other things and is wholly unsuited in bridging the pay gap between men and women. In the first instance, any employer who contracts with the Federal Government to provide goods and services or that receives a federal grant or loan, should report to the Secretary of Labor regarding the gender, race, job title, occupational category, and rate of compensation, including benefits, of every employee of the employer employed in the State in connection with the contracts, grants or loans and provide updates of the information. The Secretary would be required to retain the information and make it available to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and, upon request, provide it to anyone who is, or was an employee of the employer, during the period of the contracts, grants or loans or any authorized representative of the employee.

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Further, the Secretary of Labor should be required to provide a report to Congress and the public on the feasibility of amending the Equal Pay Law to incorporate the standard of “comparable worth.” Such a standard would require employers to pay employees comparable wages for work that has the same skills, responsibilities, and effort. Such a standard would require employers to provide raises and compensatory back pay when it is violated.

Upskilling the Workforce Economists and industry leaders contend that a qualified workforce is the single most critical component to economic growth and the nation’s political leaders - Democrats and Republicans alike – have long believed that education and training are the route back to middle class wages for those who have fallen out. The federal government spends about $30 billion a year through various programs for worker training and readjustment. In many cases, this money amounts to nothing more than supplemental insurance for lost wages. The fact of the matter is that the government is very good at mailing checks to people in a timely matter and very bad at identifying and supporting the nation’s workforce development needs.

Why should taxpayers subsidize training for private employers, anyway? If skilled workers were necessary for a firm to grow the business, why shouldn’t they make their own investment? The fact of the matter is that these subsidies have not, by and large, induced upskilling. At a minimum it has encouraged employers to anticipate more skilled workers when making other capital investments but has not increased the ranks of skilled workers. An alternative to subsiding training for employers may be wage insurance.

Currently, federal wage insurance is a pilot program for a 312 | P a g e

small subset of workers, age 50 or older, which lose their jobs to trade competition. Under the program, a worker who takes a lower-paying replacement job can receive a government subsidy for two years, equal to 50 percent of the difference in earnings up to a total of $10,000, provided the new job pays less than $50,000 a year. Wage insurance could provide an important tool in a broader set of policies designed to help American middle class families insure against disruptive income fluctuations. According to McKinsey Global Institute, companies exploring offshore outsourcing to cut costs could offer wage insurance to fulltime employees, much the same way as they might offer severance pay, for less than five percent of the savings companies realized from the outsourcing. The government could either provide tax incentives to encourage employers to offer these plans or require employers to pay a per capita tax for every job loss. Or training can be paid for by mandatory severance triggered by an employment loss.

Because payouts would be time-limited, there would be little risk that employers would be saddled with long-term legacy costs, although employer-provided wage insurance would mean higher costs. As such, federal-state partnerships could experiment with pilot programs that offer workers the voluntary option of paying a small premium to receive wage insurance which can then be used to pay for skills training.

While such an optional program runs the risk of not reaching the most vulnerable workers, such an option could be popular with a broad spectrum of workers.

Current federal rules require federal contract officers to evaluate whether would-be employer contractors can demonstrate a satisfactory record of integrity and business ethics. The evaluation criteria can be expended to include investment in training and other programs that demonstrate 313 | P a g e

a concern for human resource management. Further, just as Executive Order 11246 requires government contractors to practice affirmative action in exchange for a contract, an order can be issued that urges contractors to invest in employee re-training as an alternative to off-sourcing; or offshoring can be banned outright in connection with the work being performed under the contract.

While employment remains a private transaction, some industries may be able to engage in some form of collective action to address workforce development. As in other industrialized countries, industry associations or employer consortia can set up a clearinghouse for job training, skill certification and credentialing and job placement. In could be that the federal antitrust law may need to be tweaked to facilitate inter-industry cooperation, particularly with setting wages.

Single Payer Health Care Even with the passage of the Affordable Care Act, over 140 million Americans receive health care benefits through an employer-sponsored plan. Freelancing and other flexible, mobile employment arrangements has added to the number of people who cannot participate in a group plan. Both employers and employees are straining under the increasing costs of care. One obvious solution is for government to take over the private health care market and treat health care as a public good, subject to government allocation. A purely government-run system will by necessity require enforced quotas and substantial administrative costs, much the same as market-driven managed health care operates now. Since liberty requires choice, a government system based on rationing would obviously limit that choice. But employers and insurance companies already severely limit choice. In 314 | P a g e

short, the so-called private system of delivering health care in America is perhaps more inefficient and as limiting as any government system could be. Assuming that flexible, mobile and contingent project work will be the norm for most working Americans, the rational approach would be to dismantle the so-called private market for health care, treat health care as a public good, like public education.

Among the developed economies, Americans spend twice as much on health care; yet, for all the money it pays on health care, America is not the healthiest nation. In 2007, the CIA World Fact Book listed the U.S. as 45th for life expectancy.

Infant mortalities rates in the United States are the highest among the developed economies. The U.S. ranked 29th lowest in infant mortality rates, down from 12th lowest in 1960. The U.S. also has the highest percentage of uninsured residents among the developed world, which increases the costs health care insurance. The uninsured typically put off attending to problems until they are severe. The longer the patient waits to take care of a health problem, the greater likelihood the disease will involve complications that make it more difficult and expensive to treat. Many uninsured suffer from chronic diseases. Chronic diseases account for more than 75 cents of heath care spending, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Of course, life expectancy and infant mortality is associated with many factors, including health and economic status, race and ethnicity, access to quality medical care, and cultural problems of obesity, drug use and life styles that make chronic conditions worse. But it’s clear that treating the uninsured increases costs across the board.

Americans remains ambivalent about further health insurance reform. Most are covered under an employer 315 | P a g e

plan. Employers shop for the coverage, negotiate the insurance and offer it to employees on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. The employer subsidizes the premium 80% on average. The employee contribution is often unnoticed through incremental deductions from a paycheck. At the point of service, the employee pays about 10 cents for every dollar of health care that is consumed. This, ironically, is socialized medicine and Americans that have it understandably love it. The illusion is that employersponsored health care can be consumed as virtually a free resource with little or no incentive to maintain healthy lifestyles or to consume wisely.

Similarly, Medicare is a government health care programs. Understandably, health care providers and patients strongly endorse Medicare, even though tens of billions of dollars are spent on over-treatment every year. The illusion here is that as a public entitlement, health care is virtually free. As over utilized as employersponsored health care is, Medicare utilization is roughly 50 percent higher than that, even after adjusting for age and medical condition. In other words, given two individuals with similar health care needs a Medicare beneficiary will consume nearly 50 per cent more health care. Health care providers, pharmaceutical firms, medical device manufacturers and others have a vested interest in the current “free” health care system.

In short, at least on some level, most Americans believe that health care is a basic public entitlement, like “free” public education, and that limitations imposed either by government or corporations are unfair, illegitimate, or both.

However, health care is not free and it is paid for by shifting costs and government borrowing and it appears that the 316 | P a g e

current hybrid private-public system has resulted in the overconsumption health care in the United States. In fact, in a 2008 study issued by the National Institutes of Health, about half of the surveyed internists and rheumatologists reported prescribing placebo treatments to their patients on a regular basis. Replacing the current system with a governmentsponsored universal health insurance program may result in some form of price controls and rationing. But on balance a government-sponsored program could be just as good if not better than the current system, which already practices managed care rationing at exorbitant prices to achieve mediocre outcomes.

Reporting the Social Costs of Job Loss Americans have expressed deep concern and worry about the impact on automation. Surveys reveal that Americans believe that automation will eliminate more jobs than it will create. A majority believe that they will have a difficult time competing against robots and learning machines for jobs.

Only CEOs are not concerned about job elimination. 323 Oddly, Americans seem complacent, almost resigned to their fate to competing against machines for jobs. This competition – man against machine for the lowest possible expense – is a capitalist nirvana but a worker’s worst nightmare. Unlike workers of the past that engaged in collective action and civil resistance, most today’s Americans are detached and disengaged, Perhaps, Americans have been seduced into believing that their fate as subservient workers is predetermined. It is important to note here, that the economy is not a biological organism.

And while toolmaking and trade have deep social roots, the development of technologies that eliminate jobs, displaces 323

West, D. The Future of Work (2008) 74-76.

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workers and destroys facilities is not the result of immutable laws of nature of nature’s God. Rather, these technologies are the result of human agency and therefore can be shaped by human decisions are mostly made by capitalists and the elected officials that they influence and even control. Yet, throughout history particularly in a democratic societies, workers and their families have influenced decisions when there has been the collective will to do so.

Or perhaps, Americans, who work at meaningless, purposeless jobs, have simply stopped identifying themselves as workers. They are demoralized at work as some jobs are actually inhuman, to the extent that they increase the risks of sickness and early death. They have opted out of their obligations as citizens in a democracy, which is to participate in collective action for their own welfare, unable, or unwilling, to “prevent automation from becoming a Moloch, consuming jobs” to the end. 324 Perhaps they have simply succumbed, as Neil Postman has suggested, to “a the culture that seeks its authorization in technology, finds its satisfactions in technology, and takes its orders from technology.” 325 Some, including Silicon Valley elites and intellectual gadflies, have even suggested that Americans can become a nation of unpaid volunteers and domestic workers, supported by a guaranteed living income, essentially a nation of retirees. 326 The problem with that scheme is that half the population will continue to work and it would be impossible to tax them to support the other half. Of course, those same silicon Valley owners can be taxed at a ninety percent rate, 324

‘All Work Has Dignity” at 41 Postman, N. Technopoly (1993) 9 326 The Future of Work (2008) 89-92 325

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as was done to the wealthiest Americans during the Second World War, to share the sacrifice. Afterall, the harm caused by dehumanizing and eliminating work has not charged to the employer. We have decided that the benefits created by business and industry outweighs the social harm that they cause. Therefore, these costs have been externalized and subsidized by the taxpayers, the very people who are getting harmed. But this, too, is a complex dilemma because the worker may also be a shareholder through a 401K plan. A shareholder may gain from a mass layoff, the worker will be harmed, and both will pay for the privilege by subsiding the employer through the U.S. tax code. Thus, employers have a perverse incentive to eliminate jobs and reduce wages whenever possible. That is the history, theory and practice of passing the buck. If a manufacturing company, for example, releases air pollutants and does not have to pay for these pollutants, surrounding communities bear the costs of the emissions in the form of environmental pollution, cleanup efforts and medical costs. Externalities lead to market failures because a product or service's price does not accurately reflect the true costs and benefits of that product or service.

As we have seen, to argue that employers should be more socially accountable to their workers has been met with derision, blacklisting, violence and the death penalty; for Black Americans, beatings, lynching and murders. In contrast, business and industry are held accountable for the environmental harm that they cause. In the final analysis, human beings are considered expendable, while the environment, a limited resource, is not. We may eventually and hopefully save our planet, notwithstanding the justified resentment of police abuse, violence and systemic racism, but without meaningful, productive work we still face an 319 | P a g e

existential, democratic choices, as many of the “deaths of despair” and prison recidivists have already decided.

When a large corporation automates jobs and lays off employees, there are social costs in income support programs such as unemployment insurance and social assistance, and retraining, as well as increased health care costs. In financial accounting terms, these social costs are externalities, and except for insurance and severance costs, they do not appear in the corporation’s financial statement.

Rather than externalizing these costs, corporations should be required report them on their balance sheet. In this way, shareholders and employees will be able to get a true picture of the corporation’s value.

Remoralizing and Reconnecting When Charles Murray published Coming Apart: the State of White America in 2012 and said that white Americans were becoming increasingly alienated from the “the founding virtues” of civic life, his diagnosis seemed spot-on. In the statistically constructed town called Fishtown, Murray documented women routinely having children outside of marriage. Less than a third of its children grow up in households that included both biological parents. The men claimed physical disability at astounding rates and were less likely to hold down jobs than in the past. Churchgoing among the white working class had declined, eroding the social capital that organized religion once provided.

Illegitimacy, crime, joblessness - these are not merely the much debated pathologies of a black underclass, Murray found. They were white people problems too. His prescription, however, created a firestorm of liberal criticism. He advocated that affluent Americans should be better role models and that working class whites take their cue from them and take responsibility for making better 320 | P a g e

decisions involving marriage, honesty, hard work and religiosity. In short, Murray wanted the white working class to aspire to upward mobility.

In Empowerment Ethics for a Liberated People, Cheryl Sanders discusses an approach to achieving Black social transformation but I believe that today her thoughtful exposition concerning the spiritual and economic well being of American Blacks in the face of incarceration, alienation and self-destruction transcends race. Arguing that the experience of oppression has been the catalyst for Black moral life and thought, Ms. Sanders traces several paths that Black Americans have taken in moving from victimization to moral agency, including cooperation and achievement.

The challenges facing many Americans in the so-called “new” economy - alienation and self-destruction - are just as profound as the challenges imposed by a legacy of slavery and segregation. These challenges transcend race.

According to Sanders, what’s necessary for the “remoralization” of Black Americans (but I am suggesting that the process of remoralization could apply to most Americans, regardless of race) is a “tough-minded Puritanism, sobriety, an ascetic spirit of the abolition movement and the social gospel, which has served so well in the past as the basis of civil religion, civil rights, and progressive movements in church and state.” In short, Sanders wants blacks to be more heroic and more moral.

Both Murray and Sanders have described the same social and economic dynamics and dysfunctions, and between them have bridged the racial divide. They have also offered the same solutions – responsibility, accountability, sacrifice and a strong work ethic. Today, Americans, whatever race, are in the same boat and will sink or swim together.

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Historically, however, racial animus has been one of the great obstacles to getting a better deal for working Americans. White workers are played against Black Americans time and time again. They are told over and over that a Black person’s gain is achieved only at the expense of the white person’s even as most U.S. adults say the legacy of slavery continues to have an impact on the position of Black people and more than four-in-ten say the country hasn’t made enough progress toward racial equality. 327 But race baiting is a tried-and-true method of getting votes in many parts of the country. So called “non college whites,” who comprise some of the most vulnerable workers in the “new economy,” comprise 34 percent of all American voters and they believe that the country has gone too far in achieve equality between the races. 328 To keep from imploding, the national Republican party has no choice than to stoke racial division for the foreseeable future.

In a free society, there is no government policy that can bend a person’s will. If there is one thing that recent history has demonstrated it is that tyranny can temporarily break or destroy the will, but it cannot really change it. Change occurs when people make up heir own minds and exercise free choice; people can change only through the free exercise of their own will. 329 Free will lies at the heart of personhood

327

Pew Research Center Aug. 19, 2019 https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2019/04/09/race-in-america-2019/ 328 Id. 329 In the midst of the pandemic, many Americans believe that wearing a facial mask infringes on their civil liberties and personal freedom.

There has been no national face mask mandates, primarily because of constitutional limitations and the expected public resistance. In the states, such mandates have resulted in high profile civil resistance, creating a firestorm over the Internet. States have encountered

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and societal transformation; and it lies, as we have seen, at the foundation of meaningful and productive work. In the end, it is the American people who will freely choose their fate and create their destiny in the twenty first century. With meaningful work to do, Americans can re-commit to their obligation as citizens. For those who cannot rise above their deep sense of entitlement, or feelings of helplessness, chronic unemployment, underemployment or crime, life at the margins will no doubt always be an option. In other words, survival could either be ennobling or degrading. It is up to American legislators, policy makers, business leaders and presidents to honor work and citizenship as the keystones of democracy not in the usual lip-service but in a practical, bi-partisan program.

When Reverend King addressed the AFL-CIO convention, he was insisting on collective action from a generation that was more or less connected to a civic creed of democratic engagement. Over and over, he insisted that “If the Negro wins, Labor wins.” He fearlessly linked racial justice with social and economic justice for all Americans often observing that “God loves all of His children, and that all [people] are made in his image. And that figuratively speaking, every [person] from a bass-black to a treble-white is significant on God’s keyboard.” 330 What is always unforeseen throughout history, however, is how the culture permeates, mutates and changes, how seemingly random events can greatly influence how people live and work. For most Americans today, labor has no real meaning other than as a vehicle for consumption. People whose work has no

difficulties in enforcing a mandate, with many governors appealing to the people’s commonsense, with mixed result.

330 “All Work has Dignity” at 78.

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meaning, no purpose, are not apt to have any interest in collective action or participation. Technology has not only deconstructed the human working experience, it has deconstructed human relations. Despite “social media,” it is clear that many Americas are isolated on the job and in their social relations, obsessed with their individual freedom (even to the extent of not wearing a mask during a pandemic, against all medical evidence that it would help the community) with little or no concern for the good of the community. Many Americans work to no meaningful purpose and many do not work at all, in a dog-eat-dog existence, one against all, rushing to conspiracy theories for a sense of community, belonging and protection, This is what the so-called new economy has wrought, and atomized, striving consumers who are ripe for the taking by promoters, con-men, grifters, demigods, propagandists, brand managers and charlatans. Many seem unconcerned with building a human culture or leaving a legacy to their children.

In 1968, shortly before he was killed, Reverend King addressed striking sanitation workers from the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) in Memphis, Tennessee. Explaining how collecting and disposing to garbage serves the health and the community as much as the work as the physician, he stated “whenever you are engaged in work that serves humanity and is for the building of humanity, it has dignity, and it has worth.” 331 “Never forget,” he said “that freedom is not something that is voluntarily given by the oppressor. It is something that must be demanded by the oppressed.” As we have seen, one of the basic necessities of life is the ability to work hard at worth doing. Riffing on a parable about how 331

“All Labor Has Dignity” at 171-72.

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poor people are invisible to well off people, he prophesized “that America, too, is going to hell if she doesn’t use her great wealth. If America does not use her vast resources of wealth to end poverty and make it possible for all God’s children to have the basic necessities of life, she, too, will go to hell.” 332

332

Id at 173-74

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John J. Sarno lives and works in New Jersey Profile

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