The value of work: credentials, economics, and self-actualization

I just read a brilliant article published in 2009 in the The New York Times Magazine concerning the case for working with your hands. The author of the article, Matthew B. Crawford, holds a Ph.D. in Political Philosophy from the University of Chicago and was previously employed in a prestigious position at a Washington think tank. Five months into the job he left to start up his own motorcycle repair shop. Many would view that decision as ludicrous, as a "regression" from all the things he had invested himself to achieve. Crawford, however, viewed the step as one toward real intellectual challenge, purpose, and authenticity.

"A good job requires a field of action where you can put your best capacities to work and see an effect in the world. Academic credentials do not guarantee this," Crawford writes. "Nor can big business or big government — those idols of the right and the left — reliably secure such work for us. Everyone is rightly concerned about economic growth on the one hand or unemployment and wages on the other, but the character of work doesn’t figure much in political debate. Labor unions address important concerns like workplace safety and family leave, and management looks for greater efficiency, but on the nature of the job itself, the dominant political and economic paradigms are mute. Yet work forms us, and deforms us, with broad public consequences."

Crawford recalls one of his first office jobs post-Master's degree where he was inducted to a shiny cubicle to write summaries of academic journal articles. One of his colleagues was doing heroin on the job which Crawford believed "actually made sense." He describes indulging in his lunchbreaks with his colleagues as follows:

Come 12:30, the three of us would hike to the food court in the mall. This movement was always thrilling. It involved traversing several “campuses,” with ponds frequented by oddly real seagulls, then the lunch itself, which I always savored. (Marx writes that under conditions of estranged labor, man “no longer feels himself to be freely active in any but his animal functions.”)

For anyone intrigued enough, Karl Marx's case on estranged labor, published in 1844 yet wonderfully relevant to the American capitalist labor force, can be found here. To wit, Marx begins with the following assertion:

On the basis of political economy itself, in its own words, we have shown that the worker sinks to the level of a commodity and becomes indeed the most wretched of commodities; that the wretchedness of the worker is in inverse proportion to the power and magnitude of his production; that the necessary result of competition is the accumulation of capital in a few hands, and thus the restoration of monopoly in a more terrible form; and that finally the distinction between capitalist and land rentier, like that between the tiller of the soil and the factory worker, disappears and that the whole of society must fall apart into the two classes – property owners and propertyless workers. [...] The devaluation of the world of men is in direct proportion to the increasing value of the world of things. Labor produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity – and this at the same rate at which it produces commodities in general.

Marx later continues to discuss the consequences of the alienation of a worker from his work:

[T]he fact that labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home. [...] As a result, therefore, man (the worker) only feels himself freely active in his animal functions – eating, drinking, procreating, or at most in his dwelling and in dressing-up, etc.; and in his human functions he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal. What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal.

This may actually explain why depression is one of the leading workplace problems for employees, after family crisis and stress. I wouldn't doubt for a moment that unsatisfying work, work in which an individual does not see the results of his labor, and an unhappy workplace environment is actually a cause for depression. There's plenty of advertisements for anti-depressants in America. Doctors are quick to recommend a pill to cure our unhappiness instead of coming to the root cause of our emotional dissatisfactions.

How do we define the value of work? We can look at it from an economic standpoint and see it in terms of a labor market controlled by the forces of supply and demand and, superficially, individual incomes determining individual worth (i.e. the pecking order). We can also look at the value of work in terms of social prestige and the acquisition of credentials that raises one's economic value and social standing. Beyond this, however, there is the value of one's individual happiness in one's work namely personal satisfaction of purpose. What psychology researcher Mihály Csíkszentmihályi calls flow.

To feel like a soulless cog in a machine can't possibly lend to employee satisfaction. We have policies and procedures and quality control and labor laws, but as Crawford points out, no one really discusses the character of work, of vocation, or of calling. There is an inauthenticity to following a career track, earning credentials, and taking up a prestigious position that may ultimately lend to nothing. If there is a human need beyond the economic necessity of sheer survival then it is the need for self-actualization - to be useful, to serve a purpose, whether in serving others or through the creation of something, to contribute to the greater whole of human history. Humanist psychologist, Abraham Maslow placed this need at the top of his conceptualization the "hierarchy of human needs."

While driving back from Boston last weekend my mother and I saw a pithy bumper sticker on the car in front of us: "I would tell you to go to hell," it said, "but I work there." It cracked a laugh but it was a sad reflection to a greater social reality that often goes unacknowledged. The majority of people hate their jobs. Often they won't leave out of a sense of economic responsibility to their families, because of financial obligations they have to take care of, and out of the fear that they may not be able to find another job, that they will be stigmatized for doing whatever they want. Many of us feel dependent on work that has no real meaning to us and live in fear of the consequences if we chose to autonomy in what we do over social stigma that we may be regressing in picking a career that is not traditional or expected.

Author, Po Bronson, tackled this issue in his book What Should I Do With My Life? where he saw that one of the biggest obstacles people faced in pursuing their own whims and careers they might enjoy was precisely the fear of other people's opinions and of society's judgment at large. Yet the individuals in his book went on to brilliant, fulfilling, and successful careers pursuing what they always desired and what reflected their individuality best giving up socially respectable jobs as investment bankers, brokers, and lawyers. Crawford, similarly, has adapted this NYT essay into a book, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work, a really excellent exploration concerning the individual's search for vocation in a society that seemingly rewards and values all the wrong qualities.

When measuring the value of work one should consider Marx's argument. Value is in essence a human assumption and determined insofar as we give it credence. To place so much weight on money and social prestige undermines the value of purpose, usefulness, and contribution where one can own one's labor and see its results rather than be an extension of someone else's ownership.