'Everybody's working for the weekend...'

Recently, a friend and I had a conversation about work. He was lamenting an experience of work that is common among many people our age.

“It’s not fun, it’s not meaningful. You have to learn to survive it. You detach yourself, don’t take anything too personally. You don’t let it become your life. You make your life outside of work.”

I’ve done a lot of thinking and writing lately about the work disincentive, arguing that fears of a work disincentive are greatly exaggerated because most people want to work, based on reasons other than money. But this conversation reminded me of the troublesome nature of work.

Most people feel motivated to work by intrinsic factors (in addition to extrinsic factors – like money and survival). They want to find meaning and purpose in work; they want to change the world, participate in a collective project, enjoy the social interactions unique to the workplace. Evidence shows that people are happier and healthier when they are able to engage in work than when they are unemployed. They are also much happier when they feel intrinsically rewarded by their work.

Yet, there is a good proportion of work out there that is soul-deadening. How meaningful is it to be one stop on the production line creating more “stuff,” when we already have 30 different options for consumer products like toothpaste or frozen pizzas? How meaningful is it to be one link in a bureaucratic chain, rubber-stamping reports written by someone else and forwarding them on to the next guy?

I once spent a summer working in a car parts factory. One night, I had to fill in for someone else on another production line. I spent 8 hours spray-painting over flaws on car door liners. Eight hours, me, a bottle of spray paint, car doors, and nothing else. That’s someone’s job!

And this is the kind of work that we insist is necessary people do if they want to be able to look after themselves, or to have a decent standard of living. And if you don’t want to do that kind of work, then our culture says it’s okay that you live in poverty.

But what, then, is the point of work?

I’ve heard Jim Stanford define work as producing the goods and services that we need for life. This includes both the most basic necessities, and the things that give us quality of life, rather than just the most basic survival. I like this perspective on work, since it keeps people front and centre. Work should be about human life.

Only, think of how much work we have in our modern economies that is not about life. How is spray-painting flaws on car doors necessary for quality of life? How does advertising that convinces us we won’t be happy unless we buy, buy, buy add to the quality and meaning of our life? How is creating a paper trail or crunching numbers related to quality of life?

My point here isn’t that it is unfair for us to expect people to work. Instead, it seems to me that we need to reclaim an old understanding of work as vocation. Vocation comes from the Latin word meaning “to call.” Vocation refers to a perception of work as responding to a calling. While it has been adopted more broadly to mean any occupation that a person feels drawn to, originally it was a specifically Christian concept in which the calling came from God.

How do we view our work as part of our response to God’s call in our lives?

I think we have to broaden our concept of work, to include multiple ways in which we respond to God’s calling, rather than just as paid labour. But I also think that the kind of paid work we do has something to do with how our work responds to God’s call in our lives.

I want to be clear that I think it is possible to honour God in occupations that are menial, tedious or unexciting. The lesson I learned from my Calvinist childhood is that doing small, insignificant tasks well honours God every bit as much as the big, flashy, important ones.

But how does someone express themselves and understand themselves as a child of God when they are doing work that they find drudgery or soul-deadening? Is it fair for us to require people to engage in such grinding work simply because of cultural expectations? Is it fair for people’s survival to depend on their adherence to this norm? And is it fair for us as Christians to accept that people are forced to do this kind of “useless” work?

These are the kinds of questions I’ve been struggling with since our conversation. And they’re related to another very important cultural challenge. Earlier this year, Mariel wrote about the reduced work week, noting that it now takes 11 hours to produce what the average American worker produced in 40 hours in the 1950s, yet our work week is still the same length, and in some cases, even longer! How much of the extra production we’re capable of now is redundant? How much are we dependent on marketing and advertising just to convince us to consume much of the extra stuff being produced? Isn’t there a good chance we’d all be healthier and happier if we just slowed down, or in some cases, stopped altogether?

And conversely, there is so much work that is poorly paid or unpaid, and yet that can also be thought of as vocation. People who feel called to look after young children, for instance, are either very poorly compensated as childcare workers, or not financially compensated at all, as stay-at-home parents. This is good, God-honouring work, that fills a very vital need. And yet it is possible to do this work and live in poverty, unable to obtain all the basic necessities of life.

And thinking of my husband reminds me that there is a third point: culturally, we tend to define ourselves in terms of our work. My husband has been on disability leave from work for two years. He feels frustrated by the fact that the second question people always ask after “What is your name?” is “What do you do?” Many people who are unable to engage in paid labour resent our cultural job-based categorization. Many others, who dislike their jobs, are reluctant to be associated with their line of work.

All of this points to a troubled relationship with what many of us spend a lot of time doing or wishing we could be doing. We need to rethink our understanding of and our expectations for work, and come up with a much healthier understanding of work. Only then is it fair for us to make judgments about whether or not other people should be working.

I think a Guaranteed Livable Income would provide us with an opportunity to have that conversation.