OCR Text |
Show flMSRSSflfeS ISSUES FORUM Studying the Work Ethic . . . Editor's Note: This is the fourth in a series of 18 articles written for the nation's Bicentennial Bicen-tennial and exploring themes of the American Issues Forum. In this article, Robert L. Heilbroner discusses the work ethic. Courses by Newspaper was developed by the University Univers-ity of California Extension, San Diego, and funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Humani-ties. It is being run in cooperation with the Southeastern South-eastern Center for Continuing Education. Copyright c 1975 by the Regents of the University of California. . , By Robert L. Heilbroner "Seest thou a man Diligent in his Business?" asked Cotton Mather in 1965. "He shall stand before Kings... Let Business ingross most of your time." The famous Boston clergyman and scholar was not only talking about trade and commerce. He was also preaching about work and attitudes to work. His sentiments senti-ments are an early expression of that Puritan ethic embodied in Benjamin Franklin's homely dictum that time was money. Certainly Americans have always been known for their dedication to work. In the 1850s, a British Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry contrasted con-trasted the industriousness of the American workman with his English counterpart. After World War II, a similar British Commission again attributed the extraordinary momentum of American economic growth in part to its hardworking workmen. Morever, Americans have traditionally regarded their work habits with pride. Samuel Sam-uel Gompers, the first President Presi-dent of the American Federation Federa-tion of Labor, fought valiantly to reduce the length of the working day. But when testifying testi-fying before a U.S. Industrial Commission, he recited almost with relish the superiority of American workers over Europeans: Europ-eans: "In every mechanical trade, when European workmen work-men come over to this country and stand beside their fellow American workingmen, it simply sim-ply dazes them-the velocity of motion, the deftness, the quickness, the constant strain. The European bricklayer, the European carpenter, the European Eur-opean compositor-printer, the European tailor comes over here and works in the shop, or factory, or office, and he is simply intoxicated with the rapidity of the movements of the American working man, and it is some months, with the greatest endeavor, before he can come at all near the American workman." Probably this American work ethic was, in part, the expression of a Puritan belief in the purgative aspects of work--a blending of work attitudes and religious attitudes atti-tudes that Max Weber, the great German sociologist, thought integral to the capitalist capital-ist spirit. In part it was also forced on us by the heli-for-leather atmosphere characterisitc of American capitalism from its beginning. Freed from the lingering hindrances of European Europ-ean guild customs, the American Ameri-can entrepreneur worked his men (and women) harder than his Continental counterparts. The mill worker in Chicopee tended more spindles than the mill worker in England,' and the cotton yarn ran faster. Getting Ahead " But perhaps the main reason why the American worked so hard was that he wanted to "get ahead" in a country where hard work was thought to pay off in income and status. Moreover, it did. The historian Stephan Thern-strom, Thern-strom, investigating the life careers of working class individuals in the Boston area between 1910 and 1963, discovered that one quarter of all men who entered the labor market as manual workers ended up in middle class positions; that a third of all youths born into working class homes became clerks, salesmen sales-men or small proprietors (and one tenth became professionals profession-als or substantial businessmen); business-men); and that four out of every ten children of unskilled or semiskilled workers ended up in white collar jobs. Recent though those findings find-ings are, they seem already to refer to a bygone era. For what we hear about these days is not so much the work ethic as the fun morality, not so much the philosophy of Horatio Alger as that of "welfarism." Are traditional attitudes toward to-ward working changing? Is leisure rather than labor the national preoccupation? The Pursuit of Leisure The question is not easy to answer. Without doubt leisure is a growing concern for Americans who today spend $50 billion a year on "recreation" "recrea-tion" (not including travel). Large numbers of Americans (7 percent of all families in 1973) live on welfare. And the young people who have taken up lives of meditation or drug experiences, experi-ences, or who have simply "dropped out," offer irrefutable irrefut-able evidence of a fundamental fundamen-tal change in work attitudes. Yet, on examination, the ' changes are more complex than we sometimes imagine. Take, for instance, the trend to leisure enjoyments. Actually Americans have long sought a shorter work week: one of the first aims of the AFL was the attainment of an eight hour day and a six day week. Yet, despite the reduction of working hours to a national average of about 45 by the end of the 1930s, there has been essentially no reduction in working hours per week since the end of World War II. Indeed, during these years the number of people working more than 48 hours a week rose from 13 to 20 percent of l( the work force, and some 5 1' percent of the labor force actually held two full-time jobs during the late 1960s--for white married men, the figure was substantially higher. The prevalence of "moon- ' lighting" (although usually on a part time basis) suggests that the work ethic may not ' ' have changed as much as we think. And the same conclu. . i ' sion is forced on us if we ' '' examine the supposed modern ' '.. reluctance of Americans to do f' "hard" work. ,-' As we have seen in the previous article, it has always '' been difficult to persuade native, white males to do the many kinds of work which i' were performed by slaves, : ' immigrants, children, women. ' Thus today, when consider-able consider-able unemployment exists side I by side with unfilled demands , f for delivery boys or domestic L servants, we are again wit- .' 5 nessing an old rather than a I I new phenomenon. There are ' thresholds of unpleasantness that Americans will not will- ingly cross, if they can afford . l not to; and the difficulty of . jl employers in filling certain ! kinds of jobs indicates less an i I increasing distaste for work A than an increasing ability to ;'. refuse menial or dead-end v ' jobs. Job Acceptability Of course this rising thresh- ' old of job acceptability has been aided by a structure of public support, ranging from v j unemployment insurance to public welfare. Yet many 1 surveys indicate that most , welfare recipients would much ' ,i prefer to earn an income at a J "decent" job than to exist as ' public wards. Thus existance of a substantial welfare population popu-lation testifies to the failure of the economy to provide acceptable accep-table work as much as it does to the growth of a "welfare state" mentality. I Indeed, the rising threshold j of job acceptability relates ! directly to the question of changing work attitudes in America. One by one, over the i Continued on Page A3 I r """ a Continued from Page A2 I last century, we have seen "cringe benefits" associated ' with work move from excep- tions to rules, from privileges accorded only to a minority to practices expected by the majority. From coffee breaks to sick leaves, from two day weekends to two week (and ' now often three or even four , week) vacations; from death benefits to pensions; from the right to join unions to the right to have a voice in management itself, the idea of an "acceptable "accept-able job" has widened. This I widening of expectations has led to what one social psychologist calls a contem- porary philosophy of "entitlement." "entitle-ment." Does the growth of such a philosophy signify a decline in I the work ethic? Better, perhaps, per-haps, to think of it as the democratization of expectations expecta-tions about work that have always been evident at the top but were denied to, or not even imagined by, the bottom. This democratization is the result of many factors, not least the rise in the years of schooling enjoyed by Americans. Ameri-cans. The percentage of the labor force with a better-than-high school education has risen from 6.4 percent in 1900 to 66.9 percent in 1971. Economists attribute much of our economic growth to this growing stock of "human capital"--the education embodied em-bodied in the working population. popula-tion. But no less important a consequence has been a steady increase in the minimum mini-mum demands of entrants into the labor force as to the conditions of work. These considerations should make us cautious about concluding too quickly that the work ethic in America has changed out of all recognition. Yet, when all allowances are made, one suspects that there is a change, although it is difficult to know how deep or widespread it may be. Beyond the philosophy of entitlement there seems to lie a neVv philosophy of indifference, even of hostility, to work. Who has not been exposed to the solvenly repairs of a bored mechanic, the total absence of interest of a store clerk, the outright aggression of a hospital attendant? These experiences have become part of our national repertoire of " humor, surely a sign that they are widely shared. In our next article we will speculate on the reasons that may account for these new attitudes, toward work. |