I worked many different blue collar jobs in New Jersey as a teenager¹ in the early 2000s and I learned that every blue collar workplace has one or more of these "go-to" persons.
They're always there early AND late. They never, ever turn down requests for MORE X even if they're salaried and even if it makes their lives unnecessarily difficult.
They're often the ones most visibly damaged by the job, but they also irrationally defend their abusers. Perhaps they think that they'll be promoted one day, but why would a manager promote their best underling, especially if they've shown that they'll never be a flight risk?
[1] Seriously, I started at fourteen and job-hopped ~2x/year: a "schoolyear job" and a "summer job".
I don't think some lingering hope of promotion is the likeliest motivator for people who pour themselves into relatively poorly compensated work. Many people take pride in something for its own sake, and/or for the value it provides to others. I would argue these people are a massively underappreciated force in the world, and a big reason anything works at all. For every ladder climber slashing and burning their way through the social fabric, there are dozens of people quietly going about their days cleaning up debris, providing largely unseen services, perhaps even with little awareness of the significance of their contributions.
This is of course a caricatured oversimplification, and I am in no way defending abusive arrangements, but I worry that the relative proportions of each type seem to be changing, and not in a promising direction. I also worry about the normalization of scorched earth, such that a young person might never learn, or learn only later, that the latter is not the only or the most rewarding approach to life. Finally I worry there is a similar lesson still to be learned at the species level: reciprocal partnerships with ecosystems and other living beings tend to produce better long term outcomes than opportunistic extraction
I was this person at my old job. It was never about a promotion for me but some misplaced sense of a work ethic that was somewhat drilled into my brain. I've turned around since then and still do a lot but not too much.
I think the tendency of the Protestant work ethic to find value digging holes only to fill them in again over simply doing nothing at all in the first place is quite a negative thing; that's not the same thing as saying hard work in general is a bad thing, just that it's both the hard work and the ends it's being put to that are important rather than work itself being intrinsically a good thing.
I think there's nuances here, I imagine we can all agree that the Victorian workhouse is not an institution anybody ought to revive for example while also appreciating that not all hard work has to be exploitative.
Toil is a good way to distract from the bigger issues that are too overwhelming to contemplate.
And the work ethic is rarely Protestant, but really a stress reaction for a certain percentage of the population. One that is very hard to get out of once it starts.
Or gives meaning - it's possible to derive value from doing successful hard work outside of any external validation (promotions, accolades, raises, etc).
Do people who say this sort of thing not have families? Put your hard work in at home, in your own community. It's still work if no one is paying you for it.
Do people who say that sort of thing work for a company that they believe is totally worthless? Work can still be valuable (to one's community even) if someone else is making money from it.
> Do people who say that sort if thing work for a company that they believe is totally worthless? Work can still be valuable (to one's community even) if someone else is making money from it.
Sure, the value is just distributed the opposite of the way most people would like it to be. The vast majority of the benefits accrue to a practically random individual, some goes to the worker, and a tiny bit trickles to the community.
I would wager most people are far more interested in situations where the worker and community benefit greatly, and a tiny bit trickles to whoever owns the business.
Besides that, if you wanted to benefit your community there are much better and easier than ways than grinding away at work and being proud of the income tax you pay, I guess?
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.
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The vast majority are not doctors, nurses or public defenders. The vast majority work for private companies whose direct value to the local community is much less obvious, with the exception of paying people who (might?) live close by to the business.
The guidelines stipulate answering to the strongest version of their argument, I did that while staying true to real demographics. The guidelines notably do not stipulate I must respond to any argument someone makes by assuming every statement is true.
In the spirit of being kind and avoiding snark, that'l be the end of this chain :)
It's not even the company, it's your coworkers and a sense of responsibility towards them. Never at the expense at being abused by the company themselves, but I have to imagine those that don't see the value in being trusted by your coworkers (and trusting them in return) are probably just really crappy coworkers.
Shitty companies exist and you must always be prepared to protect yourself against abuse, but it's ridiculous to look down on those who want what they do 8+ hours a day to have value.
They specifically mentioned work as meaning-making. And no work provides meaning as raising children or spending time with my elders does, no. Once I've met my obligations to my employer my extra energy goes into my people.
I think you took what I was saying as giving exclusive meaning. Work is just a part of life. I'm not seeing anybody making the argument that work is the ultimate meaning of life.
You might not be seeing it here in these comments, but there are definitely workplaces where you are scoffed at if make a request like taking the afternoon off to go see your child play soccer.
These places thrive on people forgoing any personal life in order to line someone else's pockets.
Having been in a situation where helping out with kids caused massive insecurity issues and resulted in major problems, and helping with non-profits resulted in being stalked by some very problematic people?
I'm not sure why you can't put hard work into home, community and your job? Is there a specific reason you think that is the case?
You could make the argument that working hard at your job is setting an example for your family (kids) and community (through leadership/running a successful business/employing people of the community/etc).
If you have as much time as you want and never get tired then sure, do it all. Most people seem to experience tradeoffs between these things but I'm sure some don't.
For the second thing, you could make that argument. Are you? Because I'm old, and our fathers mostly considered "good parenting" to be work as hard as possible outside the home to aspire to wealth and model hard work. And I don't know any of my generational peers that aim to emulate them in this, because it makes you a distant and uninvolved member of your family.
So if you're going to make this argument for yourself you certainly can. I've experienced first hand what "setting a good example" through labor does for your children.
I see what you're saying and I very well may have a father who fits the archetype you're describing but it's hard to generalize or stereotype because there's so many family dynamics at play when we grow up. Not denying your experience, I'm sure the "alpha male, hard worker" father figure (or parent figure) has had a net negative in some families but in my specific instance, it's brought passion and ownership into other parts of my life (marriage, kids, etc).
It's also made me realize that yes, I want to be there for my kids more than my dad did, but I also have personal goals related to work that I want to accomplish in my life, more macro-level goals. It's also made me more involved in my community because I want more ownership in what's going on around me. It's definitely a balance and you need the self-awareness and time management to finese it.
I know a lot of people whose parents set a good example by working hard and moving up, and were also very present to them. It’s pretty normal in my peer group for this to have been the case.
The fact that your tiny view of humanity doesn’t include those people doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
'Meaning' doesn't pay the rent or preserve your job if you appear in the wrong part of someone's spreadsheet. It's dangerous to internalize concepts like this because you will get shafted by people who don't share them.
It would be nice if my landlord derived value from doing the socially useful service of providing housing outside of any external validations like the rent I pay him.
should we really aspire to being a useless lump? I firmly believe that there is great personal value to be found in the work of creation and digging an ever deeper groove.
if someone is taking your passion and making money so that they can be a useless lump - that's really fine. its sad if they ruin your work because they don't care or know better. and of course its ultimately critical to cultivate relationship and build families - so its not _everything_.
Life without work is only empty if you've been raised on a protestant "work gives life meaning" attitude and you can't envision any other way.
There are monks living in mountain monasteries who spend their whole lives in quiet reflection, doing basic chores and making basic meals, and they believe they live the richest lives possible.
I'm not saying we should all be monks, but this idea that work is the only way to live a fulfilling life is very narrow, and very much cultural.
Hello. Probably no single protestant influenced directly how I was raised and I still think, that doing something that you don't care about for 8h a day "because I need money" is tremendous waste of life, if you have any other option (as probably most of HN does).
A so-called hermit monk may achieve complete solitude, but even most monks will spend some time trading something they have of value with other monks (and possibly beyond).
That's all work is. A state of: I can do something for you, and you can do something for me, and we see ourselves as both being better off for it. Sometimes practical constraints means something cannot be delivered immediately, so a party may promise to deliver it later. That is all money and accounting is – a record of the promises made.
We're social creatures. I expect most do truly do see life as being empty if they cannot grow with other people. Protestantism may have taken notice of that, but it didn't invent it.
The point is that we need something to do, to feel useful. Sitting on a beach all day every day would get pretty dull, even if it is a common dream life.
I don't think this is particularly cultural. Most people who survived history did so through work so their children lived, or through raising children to be survivors. That's worth considering, instead of just blaming culture.
I think "we need to feel useful" is absolutely a cultural thing, or at least how we define what "useful" is cultural.
Again, the monks believe they live rich lives without being "useful" by North American standards, that's certainly a cultural thing.
In North America our culture strongly believes a person's value is linked to their usefulness.
That's not up for debate really. I mean you can try to argue it's not, but honestly look around. Look at what value we place on people who are homeless, addicts, crippled, blind, deaf, or hell, even someone who is just unemployed.
We look down on them heavily. We judge them as having lower value because they are less useful.
Even look at the original comment and the disdain for "useless lumps"
This attitude doesn't exist everywhere. Don't try and say it's not cultural.
In the real world we have limited resources. Some societies are wealthy enough to sustain a few freeloaders without causing much trouble, but there are limits. If no one does useful work then we all freeze and starve.
It's interesting to look at the social and political divisions that have been growing in Israel over the role of the Haredi (ultra-orthodox). The men are exempt from conscription and mostly don't work for wages. Instead they focus on religious study and survive on welfare and donations. More secular Israelis tend to resent the Haredi as useless lumps who don't do their fair share of work.
> Again, the monks believe they live rich lives without being "useful" by North American standards, that's certainly a cultural thing.
That's begging the question.
Historically, nearly all societies valued work because work was necessary; they valued being "useful".
Historically, nearly all societies also specialized, moving some folks away from directly producing/ harvesting food and to other jobs like building tools; they also produced art, philosophy, religion, and other things which don't appear to be "useful" but _empirically are_.
> Look at what value we place on people who are homeless, addicts, crippled, blind, deaf, or hell, even someone who is just unemployed.
> We look down on them heavily. We judge them as having lower value because they are less useful.
No. WTF, no.
Most people who are "unemployed" _were_ employed and _will soon be_ employed. Most people who are homeless had a home and will soon have a home. These are usually short term circumstances.
The folks who are long-term unemployed or long-term homeless are a completely different category: lots of substance abuse, mental issues they refuse to treat, refusal to adhere to basic societal norms, etc.
But if someone improves themselves, wow, do folks love a comeback story. I think that's almost universal across societies, but I'm happy to see evidence otherwise.
As for physically handicapped folks, plenty of them work for money. Some of them can't _but they want to_. And they find other ways to be useful to their families, their community, their society. I don't see disdain for that.
But that one is definitely cultural. Historically, most societies would "put them out of their misery". Still true in Canada.
> Even look at the original comment and the disdain for "useless lumps"
You seem to have only one counterexample: monks. Why would you assume that their highly unusual replacement of this by devotion to God is the less cultural option?
Similarly unusual, no? Compared to the number of people who aren't that? Of course a society that works to survive (which is to say: all of them) can sustain a few people not working. But that's not because they're culturally advanced people in a world of backward thinkers. It's because they were few.
Monks are just an example that very plainly demonstrates that a person's "worth" is a cultural determination, not an objective fact of human existence.
Do you need me to go and list all of the ways every culture on the planet has different views on the value of an individual?
It is absolutely cultural. For example, most Historians believe that while certain times of the year were packed with grueling hard work, the average medieval farm worker had absolute hordes of time off compared to the average modern worker. When the work was done, it was done. You weren't useless if you were relaxing in the down times, even large blocks of down time, and since their culture was based around seasonality, it wasn't looked down upon.
Very different from modern corporate work culture, where you must appear to be working all the time, even if there's no work of value to do at a given time, and even if you worked day and night last month on a crunch project.
As in...serfs? They also starved to death and got conscripted into wars. They also probably had to work their lord's land before they got to their own, if there was time. Their lives were often terrible.
They also just did more. They didn't work to earn money to employ someone to work on their house; they went home and worked on their house. That might look to a simple observer as them working less, but I doubt the serf would see it that way.
No, the bad thing you mentioned was beheading on monarchs, which wasn't normal. The bad things I mentioned happened to serfs every day. That's why your comparison was meaningless.
Just because the serfs weren't working the fields in winter, doesn't mean they weren't working. They were putting in the other couple of thousand of hours of labour that were needed to keep a household running - most of which was spent on making clothes.
Life prior to the industrial revolution sucked. It took a lot of backbreaking labour to produce basic necessities of life.
The solution that Jefferson and Lincoln (among other American Founders) envisioned was that everybody would eventually be self-employed even if they started their career as an employee to gain experience and save up capital. Working for somebody else means they get the better end of the deal (i.e. you probably won't have a job for long if they aren't making a profit off of you) so of course universal self-employment is the only way to have an economy where people get compensated fairly for the value of their work.
Unfortunately, the generation of politicians after Lincoln allowed the capitalists who took advantage of Lincoln's "free labor" system to pull the ladder up behind them then the next generation (the "Progressives") decided big business was "inevitable" and just needed to be regulated so it didn't become a monopoly that cheated consumers. The generation after that allowed the workers to form unions which could bargain for something resembling what they were worth which worked fairly well for a generation until it was dismantled as the "solution" to an inflation crisis caused by US foreign policy and US environmental policy (I'm referring to the 1970s inflation crisis, not the current one that has the same causes).
Tech is one of the few places in the American economy where the true American Dream of financial independence and self employment is still accessible even if you weren't born a millionaire and you don't win a Powerball or Mega Millions jackpot. But there is a fair question of how much longer it will be until FAANG and/or government regulation to "rein in Big Tech" pulls that ladder up like all of the previous ladders have been pulled up by big business and/or its allies in big government who pretend to be its enemies.
I never implied that transactions are one-sided. Accepting employment is beneficial to the employee, in our current economy. If you attempt to start your own business without sufficient capital (in the form of savings, outside investment or loans), you will go bankrupt before you can turn a profit because it costs money to live and because there are startup costs for a new business that must be paid before you turn a profit. But if you accept employment at the market rate (which is always less than the amount of wealth your labor creates or you probably won't be able to find an employer), you are typically paid within a few weeks with few or no upfront costs which matters if you aren't already financially independent.
The main reason why the Wagner Act was passed into US federal law as part of FDR's New Deal was because FDR believed the Great Depression had been caused by low wages. Specifically, lack of purchasing power on the part of working people due to low wages was and is widely considered a major cause of the Depression. Allowing unions rather than suppressing them by state force or allowing corporations to suppress them by private force was seen as a way to stabilize the economy and increase the profitability of corporations by driving up wages which would actually help business because consumers would actually be able to afford their products.
I've recently been looking into socio-economic diversity (i.e. coming from a poor/blue collar background) and how it affects progression at professional companies.
People from lower soc-ec backgrounds tend to focus on technical excellence, and wait to be noticed and promoted, rather than engaging in more overt self promotion. There is a great video on the topic by a guy called Luke Hart here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwKcjg5lPk8
Capitalism does not reward virtue. Also, loyalty is not a virtue.
Loyalty is for henchmen playing at zero-sum games. The idea that it is a virtue is a psyop by the people out there who would have us as their henchmen.
If your work is solving a problem that needs to be solved, you don't need loyalty, you can be on the team you're on because it's the best way to attack that problem. And when the power goes to your leader's head and they try to make you into a henchman, you can go find a different team with which to attack the same problem.
Otherwise the problems don't get solved and we all end up working for marketing in some way or another.
I think you're equating political intrigue with loyalty, whereas for many people it just means relatively selfless identification with the goals of your employer, ie diligence.
Diligence is fine, but only if the goals you are diligently working towards are in bounds for scrutiny.
They don't have to be your goals, but if you don't occasionally consider that they might be worth opposing then you're creating a safe space for evil, which is something to be ashamed of even if evil never grows there.
They're always there early AND late. They never, ever turn down requests for MORE X even if they're salaried and even if it makes their lives unnecessarily difficult.
They're often the ones most visibly damaged by the job, but they also irrationally defend their abusers. Perhaps they think that they'll be promoted one day, but why would a manager promote their best underling, especially if they've shown that they'll never be a flight risk?
[1] Seriously, I started at fourteen and job-hopped ~2x/year: a "schoolyear job" and a "summer job".