Toyota workers in Ohira, Japan, a nation whose people are known for a superb work ethic.
I have always loved to work. Schoolwork, housework, work-work: I’ve loved it all, perhaps because I’m an accomplishment junkie, and few things measure achievement better than work. You can take pride in your children – as the Earl of Grantham says at the end of “Downton Abbey” when – spoiler alert – Lady Edith finally gets hitched. But then he wonders why he feels a sense of achievement in her marriage. Precisely. A relationship is a state of being, not doing. You can mother someone. But more likely, you say, I am a mother to him.
Work, which is all about doing, is under siege right now in America. It is no doubt the primary reason Donald Trump is the president-elect, just confirmed by the Electoral College. Overworked, underpaid – undervalued – with increasingly fewer perks and increasingly expensive benefits, the American worker has said, “Enough,” we are told.
But I see something else. I see bosses who lack the Alexandrian leadership – leadership from the frigging front – to put others first. And I also see workers who lack the proper attitude for work. They won’t confront those bosses about pay cuts and layoffs. It’s so much easier – and less courageous – to blame the government or foreigners for their lack of employment or reduced circumstances. (Notice that the biggest complainers about the lack of government help in their employment situations are usually those who are the biggest advocates of keeping government out of everything else.)
A poor attitude, however, manifests itself most strongly in the relationship of the worker to work itself. Time was when people took pride in their work, no matter how “lowly” the job. Now it’s all about what everyone else has – and, thus, had badly off you are in comparison. When I told my Republican uncle that President Barack Obama had created scores of new jobs, he scoffed that they were low-paying ones. And after the Brexit vote in England to leave the European Union, dock officials said that there were shipyard jobs available that they simply couldn’t fill.
People don’t want to work. They want to work under their optimum conditions – which may be ludicrous in a challenging, changing economic climate. The other day I heard a former miner with black lung disease say if he could get a lung transplant and go back in the mines, he would do so to put food on the table for his family. I didn’t think of him as heroic. I thought of him as unimaginative. It had never occurred to him to consider a life beyond the mines and Appalachia. It never occurred to him to retrain, relocate, go to college – or, if he couldn’t or wouldn’t’ move – find a job somewhere else and come home on weekends.
When Donald Trump says he wants to make America great again, what he’s really saying is that he wants to return America to a time, the 1950s through ’80s, when people – let’s face it, white men – could count on having the blue-collar jobs their fathers and grandfathers had. But those jobs have been lost mainly to technology – and not that other t-word, trade. They won’t be coming back. And they won’t be replaced by a massive infrastructure program, because construction work is always temporary and often requires skill sets that factory workers and miners don’t possess.
So that leaves us with an attitude adjustment for drastically changing times. The New York Times’ “On Money” columnist John Lancaster writes about this in a piece about the cultural value of all work in Japan – no matter how menial or seemingly obsolete the tasks there may seem to us. I see the same pride, the same hunger, the same sense of belonging to something larger than yourself in the immigrants who work two and three jobs serving food in cafeterias and cleaning offices. I see these qualities in immigrants, who, barred from white-collar jobs in this country because of poor language skills, reinvented themselves as landscapers and housekeepers. I see these qualities in single mothers who worked, raised children and went to night school to become lawyers and doctors. (See a pattern here? Immigrants, women: These are people who have not traditionally held power and, thus, are not wedded to a sense of entitlement.)
I see these qualities in myself. I lost my job as a senior cultural writer in 2009, not because it was outsourced but because my bosses never saw the digital revolution coming. Faced with a lack of income and then the care of my aunt in her dementia and the storm-damaged house we lived in, I was ready to start my own cleaning business or look for work in a mall. I never thought I’d be a writer again and, when a similar job came along, it forced me to reinvent not only myself but my expectations.
What hasn’t changed is my love of a job well-done. Because in the end, work is not about bosses, family or even the national economy. It is a reflection of yourself.