When Andrew Russell became a teenager, he took the first job that came across. Late in the summer in Nebraska, he walked through long rows of corn in muddy fields, separating seed corn. He often worked during those hours when the sun was setting below the horizon, sending light right through the rows, dancing on the husks and getting into his eyes. Removing the pollen-producing tufts from the tops of the corn stalks can increase yields that would otherwise be obtained from open pollination. Since only the most advanced industrial farms have automated this task, it is mostly done the old fashioned way by children, a gentle reminder that the past is still with us. Therefore, families in the Midwest often view this as a rite of passage into adulthood. But Russell cared little about how he was seen; he did it for himself.
“I knew I had to make something of myself,” he said, “and I thought work was how you do it.”
He grew up watching his parents work hard but never get ahead. His mother was a cage manager at a casino on an Indian reservation near Chadron, Nebraska. His father hung drywall and worked on cars, although he had received Social Security for as long as Russell could remember. For the youngest of four siblings, money, time, and resources did not flow.
In high school, Russell compared himself to those who had more and began taking steps to meet his needs and aspirations. He trained as an auto mechanic and trimmed trees as a landscape designer. Working as a laborer on construction sites, he laid plaster and concrete, and also hung drywall, like his father. And, of course, he flipped hamburgers at McDonald's. While he clearly had no shortage of work ethic, his options were limited to manual labor and low-paying jobs. As time went on, Russell was attracted to other ways to make quick money. He wanted to be self-sufficient and disliked the pace and monotony of menial jobs. He dabbled in the black market, stealing and selling phones, cigarettes and cars. Eventually, he started dealing methamphetamine.
Meth destroys your teeth and skin. And then it kills you. But it was, compared to his other performances, a growth industry. When Russell was selling it, more Nebraskas sought help for methamphetamine-related health problems than at any time in the state's history. It was especially popular and effective in places like Chadron, where Russell lived in a trailer with his then-girlfriend, hundreds of miles from the urban centers of Lincoln and Omaha.
“Those were good times and good money,” he said. "Then my luck ran out." Russell was caught in what he believes to be a set-up, but he will never know.
He was imprisoned in the Work Ethic Camp (WEC), a maximum security prison northwest of McCook, Nebraska, where he faced a three-year sentence on two counts of drug dealing. In 2000, McCook lost a competition with the city of Tecumseh to build a medium-security prison there. Instead, they were given the WEC, a facility designed to alleviate the burden of the state's overcrowded prisons, which the locals refer to as their "consolation prize."
Originally named "Prisoner Work Camp", the name has been changed to reflect the unique educational programs it offers. Those incarcerated are only eligible for parole upon successful completion of the program, which provides a chance to "re-enter their home communities from the WEC with a proven work schedule, team experience and a positive work ethic." According to a report from the Nebraska Department of Corrections, this includes cognitive modification treatment, which practitioners believe can lead to "more appropriate behavior," and a class that "concentrates on altering the criminogenic mindset of offenders." Combined with "Introduction to Business", the entire curriculum focuses on both the inmate's mindset and the skills and readiness of the workforce.
“Believing in the work is just as important as doing it,” said another person I spoke to, who was also imprisoned there. "It's a prison, but it's also a school," he added, fearful that it might sound like an oxymoron. “Prisons give life lessons,” he stressed. “There is nothing more important than learning how to work.
Russell was not so convinced: “My point of view on the job while I was incarcerated was that it was all pointless. They expect us to work and work in slavery for little money... The mind of a worker is not much different from the mind of a criminal. It's just a different way of making money. I would know.' Russell estimated that he worked an average of 30-40 hours a week at the WEC canteen, as well as occasionally building houses in the community or cleaning the sides of local roads. Most jobs pay $1.21, WEC spokesperson says
ra per day to encourage a positive work ethic. If there was a formula for destroying the work ethic, giving people unwanted jobs with long hours and low pay would look like this. A few years ago, I created a weekly Google Alert for the phrase "work ethic" to help me gather material for a book I was writing. I have read thousands of these articles over the years. As standalone stories, the alerts are only moderately interesting. A significant percentage of articles written in American newspapers and magazines that contain the phrase "work ethic" are about sports, as star athletes are almost always regularly praised for their relentless practice that leads to excellence. Others say the same about politicians, and much of it comes from articles by elected officials or business leaders complaining about the sorry state of the work ethic among today's youth.
Taken as a whole, however, they illuminate a serious concern about a fundamental tenet of American civic religion. The work ethic is at the core of national identity politics. Reading between the lines, in the media, or even just skimming through the headlines, one gets the impression that we are a nation under attack. One nationwide poll in 2015 found that 72 percent of respondents said the United States was "no longer as good as it used to be." The main culprit was the nation's decline in faith in the value of hard work. More and more people thought that "our own backward work ethic" was a greater threat to American greatness than the Islamic State, economic inequality, and competition with China.
Widespread concern about a declining work ethic is confusing when compared to the actual data on how much time Americans spend at work. Hours worked by all wage and salary workers increased by 13 percent from 1975 to 2016, for a total of about five additional weeks per year. And there is evidence that those of us who are still working during the pandemic are working longer hours than before. In addition to long working hours, workers suffer from irregular schedules, volatile in nature, that change at the whim of their employers. And then there are the masses of the so-called involuntary unemployed who are constantly looking for but not finding enough working hours to survive. These three features—overwork, unstable schedules, and not enough hours—determine the paradoxical size of modern working life, especially for low-paid workers. There was no simple universal extension of the working day. Instead, the uneven redistribution of our working time reflects deepening economic insecurity and social inequality. It's easy to see why people actually work, but given how odious and hard it is, what supports the belief that work is good for us?
To trace the history of an idea, one must find the origins of the current. One of the reasons why the idea of work ethic has such an impact on us is that it is usually seen not only as a public good, but also as an original ideology, an idea so important and pervasive that it has neither external roots nor historical precedents. Hard work is usually considered a natural component of our cultural DNA, an inherited trait from Protestant ancestors. Or, as a servant of capitalism, she laid a solid foundation in our national character. From this point of view, long hours make sense.
We do nothing with such regularity, intensity and unquestioning obedience as work.
But it's a common misconception that our comparatively long working hours are the result of an exclusively American belief system. In the middle of the century, Americans worked fewer hours than Europeans. At the time, opinion polls showed that both groups shared a belief in the value of hard work with equal intensity. Today, Americans work far more hours—about eight hours more than Germans and six hours more than the French per week—and approve of the work ethic at higher levels, including low-income workers and the unemployed. Today's young workers, often described as lazy and arrogant, believe that "hard work is important to get ahead" more than previous generations. This correlation suggests that Americans are increasingly getting what we want: more work.
However, economist Juliette Shore found that workers adjusted their expectations as hours worked longer. In surveys, they reported satisfaction with their working hours, despite their prior preference for shorter working hours. She concluded that workers ended up "wanting to get what they get", rather than "getting what
they want". In other words, the work ethic is a form of submission, a product of defeat.
In ascribing our exclusive working time to an ideology, we are sadly mistaken in the cause of the effect. Ideology is not the engine of our life experience, but its product. Our ideological commitment to work is the result of incessant and repetitive activity, literally doing our job every day. And we do nothing with such regularity, intensity and unquestioning obedience as work. We rationalize our daily experiences by forming belief systems to accommodate them, not the other way around. Thus the 17th-century philosopher Blaise Pascal argued that since skepticism had taken the place of pure faith, especially among the most devout religious figures, it was their regular church attendance or prayer that instilled faith. In other words, if you wake up every day, fold your hands and pray to heaven,
The work ethic has another source: the need to show oneself as worthy citizens in a capitalist society. Those who are considered worthy - benefits, rights, privileges, rights - are those who can show that they are doing legitimate paid work or have done so in the past and thus have contributed to the state of the nation. This aspect of the work ethic has historically been associated with class-wide affiliation with producers.
Aristotle argued that rest, not work, is the area of life in which our true self can be realized, where people strive for perfection. How to fill free time has long been a matter of a purposeful life. The rise of capitalism gave way to a new conceptualization of both work and the individual. The rising bourgeoisie in the early capitalist countries differed from the parasitic aristocracy in that it focused on its own status as a productive class. Their self-esteem and their claims to power were based on their work ethic, which they saw as the source of society's true wealth. This means that the work ethic as we know it was hardly perceived as a capitalist slogan. Actually, the bourgeoisie experienced this for the first time.
As idleness gradually became a symbol of success among the elites, working-class movements later adopted much the same position. You had to sell your labor in order to survive, but this labor also served a socially useful function, producing what we need for a happy life. The significance of the workers as a class stemmed from their claim to be providers of the common good. The 20th-century social theorist Max Weber argued that the Protestant ethic had broken away from its religious attachments, leaving the shell of a work ethic to outlive the heavenly work. Classical political economists—John Stuart Mill, David Ricardo, Adam Smith—and their chief critic, Karl Marx, have at one time or another voiced some sort of progressive version of the work ethic. This was not just a capitalist spliff—even socialist movements sought to elevate the worker-subject as a hero of society. Whatever the policy, the advantage of this view is that we can view the work ethic as a social product rather than a divine commandment or ahistorical truth. And since we are not born with a work ethic, this needs to be learned.
Schools often served this purpose rather conveniently. In his landmark ethnography Learning to Work (1977), the British sociologist Paul Willis hypothesized that a group of working-class "lads" resisted formal education because they thought that salvation lay in the jobs in the factories in which they were employed. fathers. The effect doomed them to a future as low-wage workers, a process that Willis called "self-damnation". However, today's low-wage workforce is doomed to low-wage jobs without an act of self-sabotage. Some children are told to clean up their schools, others to go into business and start new schools—the class dynamic continues into adulthood. The main point to be drawn from Willis's book was to view the work ethic as a class ethic and not just an individual belief. We have many other social institutions to instill this spirit, such as workplaces, churches, fraternal organizations, families, and even prisons.
lAccording to several inmates I interviewed, life in a work ethic camp is unbearably boring. Somehow, teaching an ideology that many of them had already espoused or vehemently rejected did little to heal the wound of imprisonment. Moreover, the work ethic is not just a belief, but a practice specifically related to the use of free time. In prison, time is out of your control, and so, almost by definition, your work ethic. In the WEC, the use of smuggled drugs and alcohol was one of the few ways
deal with perpetual boredom. But once Russell kicked the habit, he had had enough. One early evening after dinner in December 2016, as the winter sun cast parallelograms of light across the prison yard, he took off running. Russell was a star sprinter in high school. At 6 feet 2 inches (188 cm), he easily climbed over a nine-foot fence, in one jump over three turns of barbed wire and landed on the other side of the wall.
He headed straight for the cornfields, not far from where he worked as a child. The high plains are inexorable in their expanse. They are a geological formation that was pushed up when the Farallon Plate plunged into the Earth's mantle, releasing water and hydrous minerals into the lower part of the crust, resulting in the formation of a plateau. But from ground level, the area embodies the gently rolling grasslands and boundless skies that have long inspired artists, drifters and dreamers. They also cause extreme fluctuations in temperature and it was very cold that day. He kept to the six-minute pace, partly to keep warm and also because he was running for his life.
As news of Russell's escape spread through the old social media, the insignificance of his former life closed in on him. An old friend called the tribal police in South Dakota and turned him in in exchange for a small fee. It was Christmas morning when he was captured and returned to prison, with another year added to his sentence.
When I finally caught up with him, he was only a few months away from being released. In the letters we exchanged, he told me what it's like to learn what a job is when you can't find a real job. “I can work very well, I did it as a child. What are they trying to prove? After three years in prison in a "camp" designed specifically to instill fervent faith in hard work, Russell emerged from prison on April 8, 2019 with barely enough money to buy a bus ticket to his parents' house. “It makes you wonder what the point is,” he admitted. “I like to work hard, but it makes sense so I don’t feel like I wasted my time. I want to do a real job,” he emphasized, referring to something he felt had a social impact and improved his quality of life.
"What's really important is what we do outside of work to strengthen our community - that's real work"
To make an unusual short documentary called The Real Job (2016), I hired a group of people to dig holes in an empty field for a day and then interview them about their working lives. Some of the people I hired were local contacts, and others responded to a Craigslist ad I put up for day laborers. The making of this little film drew the ire of many people who saw it as a cruel prank on those in need of extra money. But during the interview, the cast members opened up about how much a day of digging holes compares to their regular paid jobs. Some said that their work illuminated a central aspect of their personality that digging holes did not. For others, shoveling the earth with a shovel in an empty field reminded them of the work they held, but considered it socially worthless, pointless, or demeaning.
Some were confused as to why they were digging holes; others didn't even ask. However, everyone insisted that they would look for ways to be socially useful in their communities if they could afford more time away from work. “Some guys think that the number of hours they work is a measure of who they are,” said one digger, “but what really matters is that everything we do outside of work to strengthen our community, is a real job.” He defined "real work" as something that clearly had no market value, something that was good in and of itself. If we want "real work" to be a priority, we need to transform our society's dependence on low-paid/long-hour work and free up time for people to lead meaningful lives outside of their day-to-day routine. This can only happen as a result of a renewed public debate about working hours, such as those that took place from the late 19th century to the 1940s. The specter of life without work has fueled many utopian visions for centuries. But there is also a pragmatic rationale - we just don't have to work as hard to produce what we need and want as we used to. The long hours serve the political and cultural agenda as much as the economic imperative. Breaking the multi-hour economy in the process is transforming our ideological commitment to work, offering different lessons about "time well spent."
We need prisons for work ethic training no more than the Nazis needed the Arbeit Ma sign.
cht Frei" at the entrance to Auschwitz. The work ethic camp shows how desperate we are to instill the value of work as a substitute for a good job. The work ethic is easy to weaponize these days because it bears a strong resemblance to what it means to be successful in a capitalist society. But the fact that the work ethic is also based on practice and requires a lot of attention suggests that it may not be as solid as it seems at first glance. It is this vulnerability that gives us hope to overcome it.
If it is ever really abandoned, it will happen only after the work itself ceases to be something that we do all our lives for private profit, but something put under tight social control to satisfy human needs. . We cannot avoid the contradictions of some necessary work, but we can redesign institutions and workplaces that promote a work ethic. To do this, we need to revive the forgotten struggle of labor, the movement to shorten the working day, to revalue our time. The ambitious movement to reduce the role of essential labor in our lives will be a lifelong struggle, and it will occur only in fits and starts over many years - day after day, hour after hour.