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Taxes and fees extra. Speeds lower. About 40 gigabytes of city tales. Welcome to the new books network. Welcome to the new books network. I'm your host, Tom DeSenna from the Department of Communication, Journalism and Public Relations at Oakland University. My guest today is Claudia Strauss, the author of what work means beyond the Puritan work ethic. What work means goes beyond the stereotypes and captures the diverse ways Americans view work as a part of a good life. Dispelling the notion of Americans as mere workaholics, Claudia Strauss presents a more nuanced perspective, drawing upon the evocative stories of unemployed Americans from a wide range of occupations, from day laborers to corporate managers, both immigrant and native born, Strauss explores how diverse Americans think about the place of work in a good life, gendered meanings of bread winning, accepting financial support from family friends in the state, and what the ever elusive American dream means to them. By considering how post-fortest unemployment experiences diverge from joblessness earlier, what work means paves the way for historically and culturally informed discussion of work meanings in the future of teleworking, greater automation, and increased non-standard employment. Claudia Strauss is professor of anthropology at Pitzer College. She is the author of A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meaning with Naomi Quinn and co-editor of Human Motives and Cognitive Models. Claudia Strauss, welcome to the new book's network. Thank you, Tom. I'm happy to be here. So thanks for taking the time to talk today and for your work on this really interesting book. I'd like to begin today by asking you what brought you to this project? What motivated your interest in the meanings of work? It seems to be a topic I've been thinking about for a long time. It was actually the topic of my doctoral dissertation research and that was quite a while ago. And then as now, I was talking to people who were facing unemployment in that case, but this was during the 80s, during the period, the wave of factory closets in the 1980s, and I happened to live in a town in Rhode Island where a chemical factory was closing. So I talked to workers at the factory, and I was interested in how they thought about capitalism and large themes of political economy. But what we ended up talking about a law was what their jobs meant to them, how they felt about it. And maybe it has reflects something about my own feelings about work, how important it is to be. And it's also, I think, interesting, even though this project started, if I'm remembering correctly, host recession, right after the 2008 recession, great work right now, and certainly you could not have anticipated this, the study of work is having kind of a moment here, isn't it? It is, and it's so funny, because when I started this in 2011, it wasn't having that moment. You know, this is of academic interest. I want to talk about stereotypes, if Americans work ethic, will anybody care? And then really burst into consciousness, even pre pandemic, because the first thing that really made it a trendy topic were worries renewed words about automation and would, because there was a very well publicized study that predicted that half of all Americans were in jobs that could be easily automated. So yes, you know, I like to say, you know, I like to say, Oh, I for soul, well, this, I didn't wouldn't that wouldn't that be a wonderful thing? Oh, so you begin your book by providing a kind of a taxonomy for work meanings. Can you describe what these meanings are, where you derive them from, and why they matter to both the project that you're taking up here, and the way that work is understood in our culture? Yeah, I think it's pretty important when we we talk about the work ethic, as if there's only one work ethic, if it's in your actually many work ethics, and people can hold more than one of them, they're not mutually exclusive. But to start with, there's what we call the Protestant work ethic, which I actually break down into two work ethics. So I'll talk about that. And then there they're more pragmatic meanings. The Protestant work ethics are not about working to earn money, as odd as that may sound. It's about the moral meanings of work. It's about the meanings of work for how you think about yourself. And this is I got the name, I would not have given that name to it, it doesn't just apply to Protestants. I've got this name, as probably all your listeners know, from Mott's favor, the Protestant ethic in the spirit of capitalism. Faber thought he was describing just one work ethic. I argue in the book, he actually implicitly describes two, and I definitely found two. So let me go through those very quickly, and then I'll talk about the other work ethics that are not about moral meanings of work. Okay. The basic idea of the Protestant work ethic is you don't just work to earn money to live. You work also because you're not a good person if you're not being productive. And for Faber felt this was a decisive shift in European history in particular, this shift towards valuing productivity and success for its own sake. And what he was particularly seeing this among entrepreneurs, business owners, who would work and work, not just to get money to spend. Actually, when he's looking back at an earlier time period, he was particularly interested in the Puritans, the Calvinists, Puritans or one type of Calvinists, who were doing it because they felt that they were successful, that showed they were in God's favor, and they would be saved after they died. But what really struck Faber is just deeply irrational is why are they working and working without end? Why are they making work, working for its own sake? And we're just earning more and more money, not to spend and to enjoy, but just to say you're successful and because it's so important to your identity to keep doing that. That's when he focused on, but I have to say, when I talked to my interviewees, I should talk a little bit about who they were. What I did in my research is, so this was a couple years after the Great Recession, it was still a very stagnant job market, particularly in Southern California, where I am, and unemployment rates were over 12%. I went to job fairs, I went to career counseling sessions, handed out my flyers, and found lots of people who were looking for work at all different kinds of jobs. These were both hourly workers and salary relief salary workers. And so when I was talking to them, one of the questions I asked was, would you say that work is central to your identity? And for Faber, this is the sign of this living to work ethic that he found so irrational. And to my surprise, a lot of them said, no, I wouldn't say it's central to my identity. I'm a good worker, I take pride in being a good worker, it's not central to my identity. And so it was just a discovery in my research that there were so many people, the majority of the people I interviewed had an answer like that. Now, there were some who I would say did live to work, and did have that other version of a productivist, I prefer the term productivist ever protest it, because to everybody thinks, oh, this is a late plan for all of a sentence, no, it doesn't. So the people who had that other version of a productivist work ethic, yes, a living to work ethic work is central to your identity. You willingly work long hours. And this is something I know you write about in front of them like academics, right? Yeah, yeah, we do that says academics, and you talk about that in your own work. But yes, so that's there, but it was less, it was about 18% of the people I talked to, and many more of them had that answer, I'm not a workaholic, and they would see it in that way as if it would be a workaholic who would have such misplaced priorities. So I found that fascinating, not just that they didn't apply to themselves, but they treated it as they've, oh, of course, that's how any sane person would think. Yeah, sure, yeah. So I found those two versions of a productivist work ethic. And then, of course, people also work to earn money. And again, I found a couple different versions of that. One is working just to meet your living expenses, and that's, you know, the primary reason everybody works. And also, you don't want to just barely survive. You want to survive at a certain consumption level. So we got into what is an ideal level of consumption for people too? And what do you do? How do you feel when you've been out of work following the Great Recession people were out of work? Typically, the average was about eight months, nine months, most of the people I talked to was over a year. And so they couldn't afford the lifestyle they used to be able to afford. And how did they feel about that? What was important to the, what was their ideal, you know, their, and many of them used the term, American Dream. How did they think about that? So those are some of the work ethics I talk about. And then work ethic in general, what's interesting about work ethic is it only applies to work abstractly. It doesn't apply to particular jobs. It's only, how do you feel about working in the abstract? But that's something that I hope we'll get a chance to talk about later. I plan to, I'm hoping we'll get that to that a little bit later, because I think that is such an important point. And, and something straight. Well, let's, we'll bracket that off. So in the second chapter, you describe sort of two variations on this, we'll let's call it for a moment, not Protestant work ethic. How do you understand the distinction between living to work and working diligently? Yeah. Well, a lot of it invested. A big part of it is time. How do you want to use your time? The people I who live to work, I have classified them that way, because they would say things like, I work, brought work home, even though I didn't have to, I spent 85% of my time on my work. Where is the people? I will add a diligent nine to five work ethic. That was my name for the other one, which is also, I would say a version of a productive as work ethic. They, both groups, saw a moral value in being a hard worker, a good worker. But they said, yes, I'm a hard worker. I country inches during my workouts. They wanted defined work hours. It didn't have to be nine to five, exactly, whatever it was. But then when the day was where work day was over, that's it. Then they want to protect their not working time for their family, for the spiritual activities, for hobbies, for whatever it is. So how they use time was a key difference between these two groups. It's sort of the, and again, we're talking about an American context here, but laws that have been recently passed in France, where you can't call people at past certain hours, are sort of a way to impose, get away from that working to live idea, and still allow people to work diligently. Yeah, you mean living to work, right? Yes. Yeah, that's really interesting. The US has very weak protection on overtime pay. I'm a shock to read recently that in 2022, I think it was only 15% of American workers are eligible for overtime pay if they work more than a 40-hour a week. And whereas many countries, yes, in the EU mandate, an average work week of no more than 48 hours, and yes, we are starting to see these rules, these laws being passed. You know, you can't man require people to answer emails after their workday has ended, even in the US, too. Some people, you know, you see some states considering laws like this. Yeah, that would be one way to approach it. Another approach, which the Department of Labor has taken under the Biden administration, is to raise the salary level at which people are still eligible for overtime pay. It used to be ridiculously low. And they've raised it, and it's going to go up again in 2025. Yeah, last summer I interviewed Juliet Shor, and I know that right now she's working hard on that project of trying to reduce the work week. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's important, and yeah, a lot of my interviewees would favor that. Yeah, she had very influential work on this topic. Yeah. So an important corollary to these Protestants, or again, not I know lots of Catholics who are in this neck of the woods, who would claim these, these Protestant work ethics you call working to live well. And in some ways, this idea is almost antithetical to some parts of the work, the Protestant work ethic, and recognizing this is a very broad question. What did it mean for your interview subjects to think of living to work well, or working to live well? Yeah, this was another interesting surprise talking to people. Parts of it were not a surprise. Other parts were a little bit more. What's making not a surprise is what was the poor idea of living well for my interviewees. And one thing I did in my interviews is I just gave them paper and markers, and I said, draw me an image of a good life for you. And a lot of the drawings showed a house, a single family house, and a car, and usually a family. So this is the stereotype of the American dream, right? A house, happy family. Okay. So that works not a surprise. What is interesting is how hard the effort they made rhetorically to justify their desires as normal and appropriate. So they spent a lot of time talking about contrasting their desires with what they saw as excessive desires, not everybody. You know, a few people really enjoyed just enjoyed luxury and talked about that. But they were rare. Most people did not said they didn't want luxury, and they would say, I don't want a giant war. You know, I just want a Toyota. All right, maybe it's a Toyota SUV, but it's only a Toyota. Okay. And so there was a lot of, you know, a lot of rhetorical work went into discussing what's appropriate consumption. And if I had this realization, you know, we keep hearing at this trope of the white picket fence, right? And I kept thinking, like, what's the deal with the white picket fence? They're not even that common anymore. How often do you see houses surrounded by white picket fences, right? You think of any? Right. But did I do see some of it? But, but, you know, and then I realized that white picket fence image goes back to that post World War II period. And people were kind of nostalgic. They would say that was appropriate consumption. The average size of a house then was about half the size of the average nap. So I don't know if that's what people actually want. If they really want houses that small, surrounded by a white picket fence, but it goes with this moral idea of your consumption desire should be appropriate. And that is such, and again, as you said, the what you regard as appropriate is so culturally influenced. And, you know, by all of those factors, I was, you know, you mentioned the, I had, I owned a house that was built in 1950. About a thousand square feet. And we lived in it while I was going to graduate school. And then, you know, I got my tenured track job. And it was, you know, my wife and I said, well, it's time to, to, to get something more appropriate for our family, which at that time was just the two of us. And I will never forget this conversation. It was just a, and again, I think it speaks to this a little. My next door neighbor had lived in basically the same house, right? About eleven hundred square feet. And he had raised two kids in it. And he said, well, why are you leaving? Because we've enjoyed having you as neighbors. And I said, well, we just feel like we need a little more space. And it dawned on me how dumb I sounded at that moment thinking that, you know, the two of us were needing more space than this person had two kids in for, you know, 20 odd years over long they were in the house. But again, those meanings of what the space feels like to us. And again, what's appropriate for us to consume is so, you know, the influence by so many factors. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So now, you know, average, appropriate, it's three bedrooms, you know, it's got to ask three bedrooms and do that. It's an, you know, a certain size a lot. And, yeah, it can be a carbon. It's that time of the year. Your vacation is coming up. You can already hear the beach waves, feel the warm breeze, relax and think about work. You really, really wanted all to work out while you're away. Monday.com gives you and the team that piece of mind. When all work is on one platform and everyone's in sync, things just flow wherever you are. Tap the banner to go to monday.com. And they don't even, it's hard to even find. I think there's a study out that said, you know, they're finding anything that is even 2,000 square feet is becoming increasingly difficult. They just don't build to that specification anymore. Yeah. Yeah. And so one of the most, I think, heartbreaking chapters of your book deals with the idea of working just to live. And in some ways, as you said before, this is the most obvious of the cultural meanings that work can have for people because this is how we meet our daily needs. Indeed, you might even not even consider this to be cultural, but a material necessity. But what did working to live mean to the people in your study? Yeah. What I realized is its meanings change depending on the alternatives. If you don't have a paying job, what do you fall back on? And what do you fall back on and feel you can maintain your self respect? And because the alternative, some, depending on the cultural meanings in your old room, it's not just shared nationally will vary of different alternatives. So for example, in the United States, the mainstream norm, if you're going to turn to family is not to turn to siblings. Some people did. Many people did. But no, very few people felt that was something you could depend on. You might have a sibling you would be helpful or maybe you wouldn't. Even fewer turns to their grown children. And this was fascinating. The mainstream America pattern is even if you're grown up, your 30s, your 40s, your 50s, your 60s, you turn to your parents, your parents have a responsibility to help you throughout your life. Now, suppose you're a parent, you know, does it reciprocal? No, you don't, you know, there's there can be great shame in depending on your grown children, even if they're well established and fit affords and help you. Which is quite accurate. You know, my interviewees include many immigrants, immigrants from Southeast Asia, God from Latin America. And they just took for granted that part of what they were working for was not just the support themselves, but to support their parents and help out their parents. They had a duty to help their parents. I interviewed two men from Mexico who were had during the Great Recession when they couldn't get their normal jumps were working as day laborers. But and living very difficult and to mouse lives. But one of them said, if my mother gets in touch and said she needs money, I will find a way to send her running. That's just a duty. So part of the working to just live is thinking about it's not just the work. It's how do you feel when you can't get income in that source and where else do you turn. Now, the other big option, of course, I mean, their face, several people got them from their churches, or temples, or some some of their friends. That's difficult. You can't rely on friends. But the other big sources to go. And Deb just don't want to pause you for a second. You're really for wrenching stories in there about people who lost friendships, essentially, because of not wanting to feel as if they were dependent on friends. Thank you for bringing out that part on. Yeah, those were very sad stories. And sometimes it wasn't even the friends who had said who initiated this. It was my interviewee feeling, I can't just keep asking them for money. What kind of friend am I? So then what's your next source? The government. And then here's where things get interesting too, because there are different ways to get funded when so one, if you have lost a job through no fault of your own, there's an employment insurance. If it's normally, if you are have a standard employment contract, you know, if you're a freelancer, right, an independent worker, the way the system works now, with the exception of the pandemic, which was a fascinating exception. There is no one, there are no unemployment benefits for you. And there are many other restrictions, you have to be in the state certain time at work, have built a certain work record and so forth. For the most part, I would say with almost no exceptions at all, my interviewees all felt very comfortable taking unemployment benefits, you know, no stigma on that. Where there was stigma, and a certain reluctance was with something like food stamps. Now during the Great Recession, and this was during the Obama administration, the rules were lucid. Normally you have to be desperately poor and you don't qualify for very law to get food stamps. Because unemployment rates were so high, they loosened the requirements and more people relatable. And so this was a shift. It's a my interviewees, over the course of the time, I first talked to them during the 2011, 2012, by the 10th year, re-interviewed them in 2013 to 2014. During that time period, some of the kind of shifted from I'm not the sort of person takes food stamps to, wow, I am so glad those food stamps were there for me. But more typically native-born people born in this country than immigrants. And the immigrants tended to feel great, stigma, were much more reluctant to take food stamps and were more typically instead they would be turning to churches or their family, including their grown children. They did feel comfortable turning to. Yeah, and this is again this chapter highlights, I think, the sort of frayed social safety net that exists in this country. Even as you said, the stigma that some people felt applying for food stamps had to be overcome. But then as you say, the rules for acquiring them are challenging for some to even to get into the program. Yeah, and there was just that brief shift during the Great Recession and now it's kind of back to the very restricted rules. Yeah, yeah. So of course, in chapter 5, you talk about the way that meanings attached to and interact with are on ideas about gender. So again, recognizing that this is a really broad question, how are work meanings gendered? Well, I won't say innate meanings. For me, innate has a sense of inborn. But this is, of course, fascinating. And here I saw what on the surface looks like continuity, but also with some changes, historical changes. What looks like the continuity is that particularly in heterosexual couples, if the man was out of work, there would be more strain in the relationship than if it was the woman who was out of work in the couple. And so this is not, in every case, it was just somewhat the pattern, that was the direction. So that's what looks like a traditional man's expected to be the bread where the woman is not. But there were some changes in this that you can see when you compare what I found with what earlier researchers have found. So one change is in studies that were done in the 1970s, 1980s, even 1990s, a typical pattern was for dual income couples were the actual norm they've been for a long time in this country. But there would again be this rhetorical effort by not only the husband, but also the wife to downplay her contribution to the household. So it would be framed as, oh, she's just working for girls spending money. She's just working for extras. She's just working to get out of the house. Even if her income was needed in the household budget, that was not the case of my study at all. That was definitely not the case, where both members of the couple were acknowledging perfect income is needed. Both incomes are needed. And if one of them is out of work, there's a lot of pressure on the other, whether it's the woman or the man to go back to work. Practically, all the ones who worry couples were heterosexual. I just had one interview we who was gay and one who was bisexual. But yes, so there was very much a recognition, not only of the fact of dual incomes, but that this should be the norm. Both incomes are needed. The other thing that was really interesting is when you compare my interviewees who were out of work with, if you go further back to the Great Depression, there was a classic study of unemployed men during the Great Depression. And at that time, there was the argument the sociologist makes about her interviewees. She interviewed both the men who were out of work and their wives and their own children, who were still at home, their teenage children, was that the man was power from being out of work. And he would make statements like, she quoted some of her interviewees saying things like, "I'm not going to let my wife work. I would soon kill myself, let my wife work." Yeah, you know, I'm not hearing anything like that. In fact, I was hearing some of the opposite. Some of the men who were the sole breadwinners, it was only because their wife was ill or there was some of the reason their wife couldn't work or they had a child with special needs. And they would tell me privately, "Passion, I really wish she could be working. We really need that income." So that is all interesting. Although I have to say, I did find also that there were a few of the men I talked to, who when they talked about being out of work, talked about being emasculated by that feeling, not only feeling less of a person, but less of a man attaching those gendered meanings to it. Everybody was only about five of the men I interviewed. It was by no means a majority, but these images of loss of masculinity would come up for some of them. Nothing comparable for the women. They would talk about feeling lower self-esteem, feeling less good about themselves as a person, but not less good about themselves as a woman. It's an interesting distinction. And I remember, as I read your book, thinking about it, and in some ways it's still traditional, but it's sort of refracted through a more contemporary lens. And again, yeah, I don't know what drives that. It's a fascinating... And again, you're so careful throughout the entire book to point out that you're really talking about... You're not making broad generalizations about the entire culture. And every chapter, I think, has a kind of disclaimer about that. But at the same time, there are some important truths, I think, that are being identified here. Yeah, I mean, and that's what we can say. There is still a little bit more of an association of steady employment. And being the breadwinner, which means not just factually, it was bringing in money, but who has the moral obligation to keep working to bring in money. That seems even more when the chips are down or whatever it's still... Yeah. So we didn't talk about this before we started, so I hope you have your book handy. I do. Okay, good. So I'd like to talk to about chapter six, but I'd like to do it by asking you to read the opening paragraph there on page 198. I was hoping you were gonna... You told me I was gonna... You would ask me to read something, and I was hoping it would be from that chapter. Oh, good. But again, as I said, if there's something that you prefer, you go ahead. But that... This opening, I think, is terrific, and I want you to share it with our listeners. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. This is in a chapter titled Good Enough Occupations and Fun Jobs. Fun, in quotes. The work meanings described in the preceding chapters, working driven by a productiveist work ethic, working to realize the American dream of prosperity, or at least middle-class consumption, working for self-sufficiency, and the gendering of work, are about abstract labor. That is, they're about working as if one's particular job does not matter. But of course, it does matter. Work always occurs in specific occupations with typical tasks in particular physical environments and with agreeable or disagreeable individuals. The meaning of work for right participants was not just about what it meant to work at something somewhere. It was also about the meaning that their specific jobs had for them. Unfortunately, there's a common assumption in the United States that some people want to work for a living and others do not. Without recognizing that specific past work experiences and future opportunities shape feelings about working and not working, as well as approaches choosing a job. This is such, and again, such an important chapter in this book because, as you say, work has never just worked in the abstract. It's always doing something in particular. If you go back to, as I was thinking about it, your beginning question is work central to your identity. I think I would probably say no. But if you ask me whether being a professor is central to my identity, I would have to probably say yes. It's just that wherever that disjuncture is between those two ideas. Again, in what ways do you think? Well, there's a lot going on in this chapter. A lot of times people miss this, but in some discussions, we frequently miss the fact that people identify with the particularities of their work experiences. And sometimes it works in different ways. Now, let me make sure I understand your question. Identify with the particularities of their experience, seem to identify what you were just saying, like identify as a professor, is that what you mean? Or even I'm thinking of the woman in your study who was the hairdresser in, if I'm remembering Brazil, right? And it was so much a part being able to work with clients and their hair was just something that she felt like it was who she was. And when it was taken away from her, it wasn't that she couldn't replace the income, although I think if I remember she couldn't, but it was that loss of this thing that was so central to how she thought of herself. Yeah, honestly, that's very interesting. Yeah, I interviewed three different hairdressers. The one you're thinking of is maybe the one from Venezuela and without, but that's close enough. But without, because she wasn't documented for many years, she was able to, but during the period of study, she wasn't documented. And so she wasn't able to get any kind of a job where you need documentation. Yeah, and she really did see this as part of her identity. I interviewed some of the else who actually became my hairdresser, who, yes, it was also, she's not an immigrant, but she also sold this as a big part of who she was. Yeah, so I did interview different hairdressers who, and this was a big part of who they sold themselves to be, and they really enjoyed the job. Now what they might have said, and what one person did say to me, there was one woman I interviewed, who she's, when I asked her that question, would you say your work is central to your identity? She said, it's not that I work, and then that becomes my identity. It's that first I have a certain identity, and that determines the job. I get this that it was for once, just one slice of the people I interviewed, there were, there was one slice of people among my interviewees who had what I would call a passion for a certain occupation, right? They had an occupational passion, something they felt they were meant to do. That's how I define a passion. It's not something imposed by management. You can't impose occupational passion. In fact, an occupational passion is not the same as enthusiasm about a particular job. You might have a passion for your occupation, but hate your boss, or you know, yeah, right? So, you know, you can really think of yourself as a professor, but not like the working conditions where you are. But a lot of the people I talk to, and I really kind of want to get beyond this group, because they were, it was very interesting to talk to them very often, they came by their passions through traumas, through very interesting life stories, sad life stories, but they were not the majority. And what was more common was what I call people who had discovered a good enough occupation. And I think this is an under recognized approach to choosing an occupation, because what's, we recognize the idea of do what you love. You know, there's, that's young people are being told, do what you love. You'll never work until your life. So that's nice, if you can find something you love, and if you can support yourself with it, you may not. Or there are other, you know, culturally recognized approaches, find something that will pay well, and, you know, where you can advance and, you know, have a secure life. That's recognized. Work, what I call work is work. Just the point of it is to earn a living, doesn't matter what you do. That's recognized. And I, I found all those approaches. But what was also very common was what I call this good enough occupation approach. And the way this would work, people would use expressions like I stumbled into this. They would try different things and reject them. Maybe it just didn't fit their values quite what they've been doing. They weren't really interested. They weren't very good at it. But or one woman I talked to, she found the man that she wanted to marry, and he was moving, and so she needed to do something else. But what they would do is sort of gradually over time figure out, what are we good at? What do I enjoy doing? It doesn't have to be a passion. It doesn't have to be like the love of my life. We have all these almost marriage-like metaphors. You know, you should find the job you love, like you're perfect partner, but it doesn't have to be that. It's not like an arranged marriage either, but it's like, you know, it's a perfectly good, you know, marriage to a field where you like it. You don't feel you're doing bad things in the world. You may not be saving the world, but, you know, you don't feel you're doing calm in the world. You don't mind going to work every day. It meets your needs, you know, that's what I call good enough occupation. And that actually was a fairly common approach to finding an occupation. I'm thinking just to illustrate the person who had a real passion for singing. Yes. Really thought, you know, that was where her life was going to take her. Yes. And by the end was an accountant, if I'm remembering correctly. Exactly. Oh, Katrina's story is so interesting because I first met her. She was in her mid-twenties, and as it happened, Winston Efley, the day of my first interview with her, at the near the end of the interview, she said, "Oh, this afternoon, I'm going to go start this part-time job at an accounting firm." And she'd been talking about, she really wanted to be a singer. That's what she loved when she was singing. She didn't feel she was any effort, or it was so much fun for her. And she said, "Oh, I'm no good at paperwork stuff like that. I don't really like office jobs. I, you know, I don't expect to like this at all." And then I checked in with her again a couple years later. She was still working there. It turned out she enjoyed it. She was enjoying it, but she still stole herself as a singer. She was still hoping to get a job as a singer. Well, then I continued to follow her both, you know, we were touched occasionally by email. It's through LinkedIn. The next thing I saw was she becoming an accountant at that firm. And it was actually working very well for her because they let her work remotely. She eventually had four children, so it worked very well with her being a mom. And she really liked her co-workers. And this was a lovely story in these divided political times because this young woman actually was a Republican, and her bosses were Democrats. But they would just joke and tease each other. They got a lot very well. Yeah, but she stumbled into her good enough occupation. You know, in some ways it is, there was such a great story that kind of, and again, you use her throughout the book in different chapters. It's almost, and I don't know how to write it in a way, but you know, you said all the graduation speeches that talk about follow your passion. Someone needs to write that graduation speech, right? You know, that you can find something that is okay. It's just good enough, which is contrasting though with the idea of work is for some people fun. It's not contrasting actually. I'm going to correct you on that. Right. Actually, what I found, a lot of financial duties, and this was another surprise for very research, as they were going through their work history. I asked everybody just to talk about, you know, give me their life history, including the jobs they'd had in the past. They would talk about some job they had, and they would say, oh, that was so much fun. I really enjoyed that. This worked fun, kept coming up over and over again, again, from people in different kinds of occupations. Now, what I found is that the people who were most likely to describe their job as fun were not the ones who had an occupational passion. They didn't use the word fun. That was rare occasionally. Fun has kind of a lighter connotation to it, right? It's not, and this is what I found fascinating, because I think as theorists, we tend to go to two streams, and I don't know if this was part of your plan's questions getting to the last chapter. If we're trying to talk about post-work versus laborist approaches, where should I talk about that now? No, go right ahead. You know, I think theoretically, as scholars, we tend to have two ways of theorizing what work should mean or might mean for people. And as political organizers also, one is, could be called laborist, and where the ripship will, discursively, that someone is taking a laborist approach, is if they use the phrase dignity of work. So this is a kind of serious approach that just being a worker at anything, again, this is abstract, doesn't matter what you do. Being a regular productive worker gives you self-esteem. It's important. It makes you a good person. You're contributing to society. And, you know, so there's that idea. The moral, you know, again, it goes back to that productivist ethic. There are lots of post-work theorists, and the post-work theorists would argue this is false consciousness, basically, that's been opposed on us to get us to produce profits for others. And the real enjoyment in life is to be fun, just to find enjoyment outside of our jobs. Okay? What I've found doesn't fit either of those views, right? When my interviewees talk about their jobs being fun, they're finding enjoyment and pleasure at work, but it's not the serious dignity. It's the pleasure of joking with their colleagues, you know, like Katarina, you know, joking with their policies about their politics. It could be enjoyment of the tasks themselves, and some of them did find fun in the tasks themselves. And it could be different kinds of tasks. It could be, and so I had a supply chain strategist who found that intellectually interesting. I had a secretary who really enjoyed figuring out power points and Excel spreadsheets. Really, she used the word "fun" for that. I had a human resources manager who, when he had an international assignment, really enjoyed that. So it could be many different kinds of jobs, but again, it has this lighter, it's not being a good person. It's not even fun, you know, I'm actually even fun, which is another part of my complaint about Weber's idea of the protest didn't work ethic. It's also serious and so moral. And this isn't so serious, and it really does tend to go a little bit more with this good enough occupation. Just, you know, I'm not taking it so seriously. Yeah. So in the final chapter, you reflect on really the many ways that the pandemic has upended much of what we think about work and offer some ideas about what work might look like in the future. Based on your research, and again, you're very careful to bracket that off and saying, "This is just right." Based on this, what friends do you see shaping how we understand the place of work in our lives today? Yeah, you know, I'm glad you asked that because I've been giving a lot of thought to that. And again, I don't want to say that what I'd bound to, would have all true full of time, you know, to take a very obvious example, you know, when I was interviewing people in the 2010s before remote work became common. Catarina's boss's letter worked remotely before the pandemic, but nobody else was working remotely. And that is an important trend because it's shaping not only our ideas about the place of work, but inevitably also the timing of work and what holds you, how you'd integrate your non-work activities with your work. And that is really important. I'd really think big trends that I don't think has talked enough. Obviously, there's a lot of talk about automation, you know, that's where people often go first thinking about the future of work. And that is important to think about. But I can get to that in a minute, but I think a really important trend that we need to pay more attention to is the rise of is getting away from standard employment contracts, and the rise of independent contracting, freelancing, game work, platform work, right. There, it was a really surprising statistic, a survey by McKinsey, where they found that more than a third, this was last year, if it goes in York, or the two years ago, they found more than a third of Americans how our independent workers, gig workers, freelancers, substitute workers, on-call workers. And for most, for the vast majority, it was their primary source of income. It was an extra income. It was their primary source of income. And this was a huge increase, just even from 2016, when it was more like just a little reporter. Now it's over a third. This is huge. It's getting away from you were on somebody else's schedule. You know you're making your own schedule, but not always. You could be working for a 10th agency that complies you somewhere where somebody else is making your own schedule. But it's getting away for, obviously, we talk about paternity. It's obviously more precarious. You can't count on this income. It's also the flip side of that is insert circumstances. You may be able to make your own schedule, make your own time, you know, a little bit more that way. I don't want to put it just in negative terms as precarity. I just want to think about, you know, this cheating is very much the whole way we think about the place of, you know, of working our lives. We've gotten away from what some theorists had called the work society, where you just assume that adults, or at least heads of household, will hold the vast, if about an eight hour, have a eight hour working day, five days a week, approximately. Everything else disorganized around that. We're starting to move away from that. And that's going to change everything. I thought, my gosh, I was talking to people who were unemployed. You can't be unemployed without having standard employment, you know, right? I wouldn't be able to do a study like this in the future, you know? Yeah, that social safety net, again, doesn't often apply to these folks either. Oh, and it doesn't. Now, yeah, but you're in this kind of constant state of hustling for a job, or maybe we're in a state of not hustling so much. We have enough to get by for a while, and now I have to hustle again. But it's not either working or not working. Yeah, again, the interview I did with Juliet Shor was about this topic. Oh, good. If any, that's summer. Oh, I'll have to listen for that. Yeah, she's, yeah, she's wonderful. And I know she was influenced a lot in her work, her first look on conspicuous consumption. She was influenced a lot by Beyblen. And Beyblen, you know, one of the things Beyblen talked about that's so interesting is there used to be, it used to be that wealth, one sign of wealth was conspicuous consumption of leisure. And then that changed to the wealthy or the upper middle class, at least, were marked by conspicuous consumption of time, staying busy, hustling, hustling, working, hustling. Is that going to change? You know, that's interesting. Yeah, it raises a lot of questions. Did you want to say something about automation? You, you, yeah, very quickly. I mean, I think one of the big points I want to make with this research is meanings of working or not working are not fixed for all time. I see people talking about future, suppose it were true that the robots come and take our jobs or, you know, chat cheapy and tea comes and takes our jobs, whatever. Suppose they were true, you know, at that point, working with society will changed, how we use our time will have changed, family structures will change, gender roles will keep changing. We can't assume that the way people reacted to factory closings in the 1980s is how they're going to react in the future. Yeah. So before I let you go today, I'd like to ask, what are you working on next? Well, one thing that interests me in addition to, you know, publicizing this, of course, but my next big project actually is a little bit also up your alley as somebody who looks at discourse and rhetoric. I'm really interested in different ways of analyzing interviews and other kinds of discourse to get at not things, what they say about cultural meanings that's not obvious. Okay. So I'm kind of right about different methods for analyzing. Okay. Very interesting. Yeah. Well, thank you again so much for your time today. Well, thank you, Tom. I really appreciate it. Thank you for asking those questions and giving me a chance to go through the whole book that I really appreciated that. Absolutely. So once again, my guest today has been Claudia Strauss, the author of What Work Means Beyond the Puritan Work ethic from ILR Press and imprint of Cornell University Press. My name is Tom DeSenna and you are listening to The New Books Network. (soft music) [MUSIC PLAYING]
