Worker Voice and Political Participation in Civil Society: Lousy Work Is Bad for Democracy

The stories are familiar by now: businesses claim that there’s a labor shortage and others reply that they need to pay more. Pay is obviously an important part of a job, but we need to remember that the positive and negative aspects of work are complicated, which means that we must consider more than pay when evaluating job quality and worker well-being. Among many important things, this includes paying attention to how the quality of work affects society.  

Concerns with how workplace experiences affect the political arena are longstanding. Over 150 years ago, John Stuart Mill advocated for worker cooperatives and participatory economic systems because he believed economic democracy fostered political democracy. Most workers, however, do not work in cooperatives. But varying forms of worker voice can have elements of economic democracy, or more widely-speaking, at least some degree of autonomy. In a seminal book, Carole Pateman argued that individuals with autonomy in their work—e.g., the ability to control certain aspects of the job—develop confidence that they are capable of autonomous action. This confidence can spill over to the political and civic arenas leading to higher levels of participation in these arenas. In other words, workplace voice can create “psychological supports” for political and civic engagement. A second line of theorizing focuses instead on skill development. That is, exercising voice in the workplace can enhance skills pertaining to things like advocacy, negotiation, and communication, which can also be useful in the political and civic arenas. So workplace voice can lead to greater political and civic participation through skill enhancement.

Stronger forms of workplace democracy include being represented by a labor union or works council, and being involved with these forms of voice can also trigger both of these channels. That is, participating in a union or works council—and probably a worker center, too—can enhance confidence, instill beliefs about the importance of democratic decision-making, and develop skills that translate into greater political and civic engagement. 

If individual or collective voice prompts greater political and civic participation through these channels, it’s a happy byproduct of workplace voice rather than intentional one. But labor unions and other collective bodies can also intentionally try to increase political and civic participation through voter registration and get-out-the-vote drives, campaigns to contact politicians or join demonstrations, and training programs for political advocacy and running for political office. So unintentionally and intentionally, unions, works councils, and worker centers can build “democratic character: the willingness and capacity of individuals to engage in democratic politics and to do so in ways that are informed by judgements of the common good.” Conceptually, then, we should expect workers involved with these forms of collective voice to participate more readily in the political and civic arenas compared to workers that lack avenues of workplace voice.

But does this happen in practice? Ryan Lamare and I have recently reviewed the literature, and we conclude quite strongly that there are strong relationships between individual or collective voice on the one hand, and political and civic participation on the other. One of our favorite studies—because we authored it!—shows that across 27 European countries, workers with greater individual workplace voice are more likely to vote, contact politicians, work in a political party, and engage in other activities. This is just one of a number of studies on individual voice that have broadly similar findings across various samples and using diverse measures of individual voice and political participation. But spillovers are not guaranteed—supervisor support or suppression can also affect the workplace-political linkage. There is also a large literature on the effects of union voice. Empirical results show that union members are more likely to vote (in the US, Canada,  and Europe), engage in other political activities, and give to charity. There's also evidence that unions can also mobilize non-members to engage in protests. 

Admittedly, specifically identifying causal relationships can be challenging. For example, workers who are pre-disposed toward political and civic participation might look for jobs with individual and/or collective voice, so their observed participation was not caused by workplace voice. But the studies that are able to specifically address issues of causality typically find that non-causal explanations cannot fully explain the observed empirical relationships. In other words, it appears that individual and collective voice prompt some additional political and civic participation that would not have occurred in the absence of this workplace voice. In this way, having more individual and collective voice would be good for society.

Consequently, while individual and collective forms of worker voice are accurately viewed primarily as workplace phenomena, the interconnections to and ramifications for political and civic engagement should not be overlooked. Labor unions, with their own internal participatory, democratic systems and their incentives for political education and mobilization, are perhaps the form of worker voice in which it is easiest to expect there to be spillovers into the political and civic arena—including spillovers that are the byproduct of experiencing unionization and others that result from intentional union strategies. But even the experience of individual forms of workplace voice such as in-job autonomy can have spillovers by fostering democratizing attitudes and civic skills.

Across time and space, then, what happens at work is not expected to stay at work. Researchers and commentators often present this in a positive frame, as has been done here—that is, higher levels of workplace voice are associated with higher levels of political and civic participation. But it is important to remember that if this is true, then so is the corresponding negative framing—that is, dictatorial and authoritarian workplaces in which workers lack individual and/or collective voice likely lead to lower levels of political and civic participation, with consequent negative impacts on society. Pay might be the #1 concern of workers struggling to make ends meet, but societally we should be pushing not only for jobs that allow workers to support themselves and their families, but also that contribute to the broader health of our society.

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Source: John W. Budd and J. Ryan Lamare (2021) "Worker Voice and Political Participation in Civil Society," in Klaus F. Zimmermann, ed., Handbook of Labor, Human Resources and Population Economics (Cham: Springer). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57365-6_213-1 [free access to the pre-publication version here].

Will Work Really Change That Much?

 As people look ahead to the end of the Covid-19 pandemic, many are heralding a work-from-home revolution. But for centuries, it’s been easy to overstate predictions about the future of work. Even when they are not just plain wrong, such predictions are, at best, only partially true because how people experience work varies tremendously by education and skill level, gender, race, class, age, unionization, geography, sector, occupation, employer, and more. Even someone in 1935 who predicted a future of greater unionization in the wake of the then-new National Labor Relations Act would have been more wrong than right. 

Predictions about remote work are likely to suffer the same fate. Even during the height of the pandemic, less than half of U.S. workers were working remotely, and having the privilege of being able to do so was much less likely for Black and Hispanic workers and those without a college degree. When women choose flexible working arrangements, they are more likely than men to be perceived as having weakened career commitment. So even if we think that the future of work will be significantly different because remote work outlives the pandemic, this change will likely reproduce inequalities rooted in intersectional combinations of gender, race, and class. So at a fundamental level, this doesn’t sound like much of a change.

But will remote work even outlive the pandemic? The optimistic prediction is that workers who have been able to work at home will be able to have the autonomy to choose how to best structure their working arrangements. Most workers lost this autonomy with the advent of industrialization and the shift from home-based work to mills, factories, and offices. So at first glance, this could be a significant change for some workers. But less optimistically, this could become more of a return to pre-industrialization work arrangements than workers imagine. In a widely-publicized editorial, the CEO of Washingtonian Media openly admitted that if workers are rarely on-site, then “management has a strong incentive to change their status to ‘contractor.’” Indeed, Nicola Countouris and Valerio De Stefano warn that only employees with “highly-desirable, hard-to-find, firm-specific, ‘core’ skills” are likely to remain as regular employees while being allowed to work remotely; others are likely to be reclassified as contractors, with the accompanying loss of benefits and security. So even if it looks like workers have a choice of working remotely, for many it could be less of a free choice and more of an economically-coerced choice. Again, this doesn’t sound like much of a change in the fundamental nature of capitalist work.

Industry leaders have also been trying to lead the narratives around the future of remote work. Finance industry leaders have largely been preaching the need to return to the traditional office while technology industry leaders have signaled greater willingness to continue with remote work. These differences may stem from a variety of reasons, such as assumptions of how to manage workers, a need for different mentoring methods in certain settings, or the tech industry’s self-interest in selling products that support remote work. More generally, there are multiple reasons why a return to traditional work is likely, such as a need for belonging, learning from others, and separating work from home. But in any case, these narratives are laying the foundation for decisions about the future of work that will likely be made by employers, not workers, without significant worker voice.

While (some) employers are re-assessing their policies on work, it is also likely that workers and their families will be doing their own re-assessments. One recent survey revealed that a full-time, stay-at-home parent is the most popular family structure for caring for young children except among those earning more than $150,000. So 25 percent of women are thinking about reducing their labor market attachment, including dropping out of the workforce altogether. Others are re-assessing whether low-paid retail jobs are worth it when they face bullying from the public because of masks, their race, or other things that have become politicized and divisive. But until there are significant shifts in power relations, a recognition of deep-seated structural inequalities and privilege, and changed social norms, these reassessments are likely to yield individual and family decisions about work that react to the options available to them rather than shape new forms of work in meaningful ways. If work is going to shift more fundamentally, we need to center power and public policy, and do so in identity-conscious and intersectionality-aware ways.

So in thinking about the future of work, we need to remember that work is complex and diverse. If we focus on remote work, increased flexibility doesn’t fundamentally change the nature of the employment relationship. Workers are still trading their time for money fulfilling the policies and requirement set by employers. More importantly, a focus on remote work renders a majority of the workforce invisible, especially those who have traditionally been most vulnerable and least well-off. This is where a fundamental change is needed the most. So if we are looking at remote work to see whether work is really changing, we’re looking in the wrong place.

Does 5 to 9 solve 9 to 5?

In the title song for the 1980 movie "9 to 5", Dolly Parton captured the inhumanity of underpaid and over-harassed working women, which includes the well-known chorus:

Working 9 to 5, what a way to make a living
Barely gettin' by, it's all taking and no giving
They just use your mind and they never give you credit
It's enough to drive you crazy if you let it
9 to 5, for service and devotion
You would think that I would deserve a fair promotion
Want to move ahead but the boss won't seem to let me
I swear sometimes that man is out to get me.

From this chorus you can get a pretty good idea that work isn't portrayed all that positively in the song and accompanying movie. Work here is unfair, unequal, and sexist. Fast forward 40 years and Dolly Parton's song has been rewritten — or perhaps we should say "has pivoted"? — to "5 to 9" for a Super Bowl commercial:

 Replacing the original chorus, but with essentially the same tune, 9 to 5 becomes:

Working 5 to 9, making something of your own now
And it feels so fine to build a business from your know-how
Gonna move ahead, and there's nothing that you can't do
When you listen to that little voice inside you
Well you got dreams and you know they matter
Be your own boss, climb your own ladder
That moment's getting closer by the day
And you're in the same boat with a lotta your friends
Launching ideas you all believe in
The tide's gonna turn and it's all gonna roll your way.

In many respects, nothing has improved — in real life, and in the song's portrayal of work. The Super Bowl commercial starts out with repetitious images of the drudgery of office work and bored office workers — again, not a rewarding way to make a living. And the new chorus above has you dreaming of something better and being your own boss because the daily grind is just that.

But as I've explored in my book The Thought of Work, work is complicated and can have multiple meanings. In addition to being a curse, drudgery that people tolerate to earn money, or something endured to confirm your social status as someone who works rather than loafs, work can also be a source of freedom and fulfillment — be your own boss, climb your own ladder, launch your own creative ideas.

Work as freedom and fulfillment are a reality for some (at least partly); a dream for others. And yet, 5 to 9 has created a backlash, including in provocative opinion pieces in the New York Times and NBC News. To see why, we need the remainder of the new 5 to 9 lyrics:

Working 5 to 9 you've got passion and a vision
'Cause it's hustlin' time, a whole new way to make a livin'
Gonna change your life, do somethin' that gives it meanin'
With a website that is worthy of your dreaming
5 to 9, you keep working, working, working
Working 5 to 9, 'til your dreams, come true
Working 5 to 9, you keep dreaming, dreaming, dreaming
5 to 9, 5 to 9, you can do it

One controversy stems from the apparent celebration of "working, working, working" at a time when many feel overworked during the pandemic. Particularly ironic or galling is that the original 9 to 5 was somewhat of a feminist anthem, but 5 to 9 becomes extra humiliation as women are bearing much of the extra caring burdens with children home from school and elderly relatives unable to access support services. Indeed, 5 to 9 could mean 5pm to 9am (the famous "second shift") so that women are expected to work, work, work around the clock.

Another controversy is that, whether intentional or not, the "hustling time" reference in the new lyrics taps into slang around the gig economy in which workers are continually forced to work side hustles or numerous jobs just to make ends meet. This is particularly true during the pandemic with record rates of job loss and unemployment. We shouldn't be celebrating how hard it is to make a living. 

So how should we interpret 5 to 9? Is it really a way to really break from jobs that are "all taking and no giving" such that people can earn a decent living doing "something that gives [life] meaning" without needing to work side hustles and multiple jobs, or becoming overworked through working, working, working. That is, does it allow you to take your day job and shove it, to paraphrase another well-known work song? If so, then this would be a good thing.

But the harsh reality is that for many, this takes more than a website worthy of their dreaming (yes, 5 to 9 is an ad for a web hosting and design company, Squarespace). So 5 to 9 really is 5pm to 9am, and it's added on top of other jobs. If this is the case, then we shouldn't be celebrating overwork. We should be trying to improve work so that people have can high-quality jobs that allow them to support a family without being overworked. And we should be doing so in ways that recognize rather than deny the deep inequalities rooted in race, gender, class, and other identities that shape work. But in the meantime...

9 to 5, yeah, they got you where they want you
There's a better life and you think about it don't you
It's a rich man's game no matter what they call it
And you spend your life putting money in his wallet

Should Work Be More Like BDSM Role-Play?

“You can’t say ‘orange’ to your boss.” Wait a minute, what?!? Is “orange” some kind of offensive slang I’m not aware of? I don’t think so…so taken in isolation, this sentence from David Graeber’s book Bullshit Jobs (p. 282) seems odd. But it’s actually quite important. “Orange” is being used here as an example of a safe word analogous to what someone would have in erotic role-playing involving bondage, discipline, dominance and submission, and sadomasochism (BDSM). Graeber is right—you don’t have a safe word at work, but you should.

It’s easy to envision a sadistic boss who enjoys humiliating or inflicting pain on others. We might also joke that only a masochist could put up with certain bosses or jobs that look painful to us. But at a more fundamental level, many, if not all, jobs can be seen as having a (non-sexual) sadomasochistic nature because of the dependency nature of the employment relationship. In her book Sadomasochism in Everyday Life, Lynn Chancer argues that “many workers, like the masochist, find themselves subject to chains of command that induce extreme dependency and a tendency toward the experience of oneself as inferior relative to an allegedly superior authority” (p. 106). And for bosses, “perpetually insecure himself or herself (why else would the capitalist need to figuratively bind and restrict the freedom of the worker?), no level of control really satisfies” (p. 109) so there is a sadistic-like (in psychological terms) continual push for dominance. Chancer further argues that the feeling of power is more satisfying or authentic when the subordinate exhibits some resistance or independence (hence bosses want employees with initiative), but not so much as to threaten the hierarchy.

So paid work in a hierarchical system with economic, legal, and other inequalities has important elements of a sadomasochistic relationship. But (non-pathological) BDSM role-playing has other critical features (Elena Faccio et al., Forbidden Games: The Construction of Sexualityand Sexual Pleasure by BDSM ‘Players,’ Culture, Health & Sexuality, 2014). Specifically, BDSM players design the rules of the game, are aware of their roles, and can withdraw their consent at any time by the use of an agreed-upon safe word. As Graeber notes, “This is precisely what’s lacking in real-life sadomasochistic situations. You can’t say “orange” to your boss. Supervisors never work out in advance in what ways employees can and cannot be chewed out for different sorts of infractions, and if an employee is…being reprimanded or otherwise humiliated, she knows there is nothing she can say to make it stop” (pp. 121-2).

You might say, but a worker can say “I quit.” But this is only a safe word if a worker can easily find similar work and pay elsewhere—an assumption frequent in mainstream economic (neoliberal) thought and associated public policies, but often not a reality for many workers.

Graeber argues that a universal basic income would turn “I quit” into a safe word because at least some level of income would not be dependent on a particular job. I would add that there are other things that could also be done to make work more like BDSM role play that fulfills the BDSM “safe, sane and consensual” (SSC) code:

·       Require employers to provide a written statement to all employees disclosing all terms and conditions of employment, including being able to be fired at any time for almost any reason. This might not change the actual terms and conditions of employment, but it would at least give workers more clarity about what they are signing up for.   

·       Enact statutory protections for employee free speech in which private and public employers are not allowed to violate an employee's freedom of expression either in or out of the workplace. Again, this might not change the actual terms and conditions of employment, but it could give workers more power to articulate their desires and object to certain things.

·       Grant workers the right to meet with their employer to request a flexible work schedule, a certain number of hours, or other scheduling items. This could help workers be part of designing at least some of the “rules of the game.”   

·       As Steve Befort and I have argued in Invisible Hands, Invisible Objectives: Bringing Workplace Law and Public Policy Into Focus, the United States should enact an American Good Cause Termination Act in which employees can only be fired if there is “good cause” for such an action. A just cause standard is nearly universal in U.S. union contracts, and in CEO contracts. By outlawing both bad and irrelevant reasons for dismissing employees, this could give workers greater power to object to onerous conditions without having to quit, and could also better protect them if they wanted to form a union to improve their power.

None of these would necessarily fully solve the dependency issues inherent in the modern employment relationship. That is, work for many might be hopelessly sadomasochistic. Which means that it's important for us to think about ways to create a better balance to promote what I've called "employment with a human face." Or as provocatively put forth by Graeber (p. 283): “What would be the equivalent of saying “orange” to one’s boss? Or to an insufferable bureaucrat, obnoxious academic advisor, or abusive boyfriend? How do we create only games that we actually feel like playing, because we can opt out at any time?”

Perhaps surprisingly, then, making the employment relationship more like (non-pathological) BDSM role-playing with its SSC principles would be a good thing. You should be able to say “orange” to your boss. And many other things, too.

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Note: ICYMI, in last month's blog post I wrote about some of my other reactions to Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs. 

Fawning for Favors: Tipping, Harassment, and the Need for One Minimum Wage

Controversies around tipping are seemingly everywhere these days. Tip jars seem to be proliferating at the same time as some restaurants are experimenting with banning tips. It’s always hard knowing who to tip and how much, and even more so when traveling abroad. Even the New York Times ran a story on “To Tip or Not to Tip Your Uber Driver” last year, and class action lawsuits prompted Uber to allow drivers to put up signs indicating that tips are appreciated.

But have you ever stopped to think about the origins of tipping and the continued implications for workers who primarily rely on tips for most of their income? As someone who studies work, I’m embarrassed to admit that I had not. Until last week. It was then that the University of Minnesota’s Center for Human Resources and Labor Studies sponsored a provocative presentation by Saru Jayaraman (co-founder and co-director of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, Director of the Food Labor Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley, and as the author of Behind the Kitchen Door, a fellow Cornell University Press author), a visit that was facilitated by the Minneapolis worker center CTUL.

The precise origins of tipping are unknown but a key early step seems to be the expectation dating back to at least the 17th century that visitors to private English homes give money to the host’s servants because of the extra work they’ve had to do. These aristocratic origins made tipping seem un-American and un-democratic in the 1800s and early 1900s as those who received tips were seen as servile rather than equals. Indeed, starting in 1909 several states outlawed tipping, though these laws didn’t survive for more than a decade.

What did survive were the racist and sexist foundations of beliefs on who was lowly enough to be exploited by tipping, such as African-American porters and immigrant maids. As nicely summarized by Kerry Segrave in Tipping: An American Social History of Gratuities,

Tipping seems to have started with the traveling aristocracy and spread downward class by class. With the rise of wage labor in industrial capitalism, the number and position of servants declined. That same rise in industrial capitalism brought with it an increase in commercial eating and drinking establishments, hotels, and mass transportation wherein those who received tips—maids, valets, waiters, and so forth were found in large numbers. As a greater proportion of people dined out, stayed in hotels, traveled on trains, and so on, they found themselves in tipping situations. All of those who received tips in the past were regarded as social inferiors at a time when such distinctions were felt to be normal and natural—God’s will. All the services for which tips were given—serving meals, carrying luggage, making beds, drawing drinks, and so forth—were regarded as menial labor. Those legacies of who was tipped for what services remain with us today. (p. 5)

In addition to views on servility, another important legacy of the history of tipping is an enduring debate over whether tips should be included in the calculation of earnings when determining if workers reach at least some level of minimum earnings, . For several decades, the side favoring the inclusion of tips has been winning. Since 1966, U.S. federal law allows a lower sub-minimum wage for tipped workers. Currently, the federal minimum wage for workers who earn at least $30 per month in tips is a measly $2.13. And this has not increased since 1991! If workers do not earn sufficient tips, the employer needs to pay at least the standard (non-tipped) minimum wage, but this entails significant record-keeping and there are high rates of non-compliance.

Many states have their own minimum wage laws that exceed federal standards, but only seven states, including Minnesota, require that tipped workers earn the same minimum wage as others.  An eighth state (Maine) recently enacted minimum wage changes that will lead to tipped workers earning the full minimum wage, though there is already a movement to undo this change. And Minneapolis is considering excluding tipped workers from a possible increase in a city minimum wage.

Which brings me back to Jayaraman’s provocative talk passionately arguing that this change being considered by Minneapolis would be a significant step backwards. You might be thinking, why is this a problem? Don’t tipped workers bring home more than the minimum wage? Well…not as much as you might think. Even including tips, tipped occupations are routinely among the lowest-paying jobs in the economy. And according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median hourly earnings for waiters and waitresses in 2015 was $9.25 including tips; the 75th percentile was only $11.65.

But the more fundamental and eye-opening issue revealed by Jayaraman is the pervasive power differential created by a subminimum wage that leads to endemic sexual harassment. Most restaurant servers are women. And when their living depends on earning tips, they are exceptionally vulnerable to unwanted sexualization and sexual behavior because they are beholden to the customer. Indeed, the report "The Glass Floor: Sexual Harassment in the Restaurant Industry" by the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United revealed that 60 percent of women restaurant workers experience sexual harassment, and over 50 percent report that they experience harassment on at least a weekly basis. These rates of harassment are highest in states with the $2.13 minimum wage for tipped employees. As Jayaraman noted, this is a pretty disgusting way to introduce millions of young women to the working world. Consequently, the One Fair Wage campaign is pushing for an end to the subminimum wage for tipped workers—not an end to tipping, but an end to the subminimum wage. I recommend their video "The Time Is Now."

In 1896, Gunton’s Magazine wrote that rather than working for wages, tipped workers are “fawning for favors” and thus, tipping undermines the personal freedom and dignity of tipped workers (July, p. 16). More than 100 years later, this continues to be particularly true for tipped workers who lack the protections of the full minimum wage. 

Working with Purpose…Not Just for the Productive

In April I had the pleasure of meeting Arthur Woods (@ArthurWoods), a co-founder of Imperative, who was in Minneapolis to speak at a couple of our events, including our annual HR Tomorrow conference. Imperative emphasizes working with purpose—creating a measure of purpose, identifying the importance of purpose, and helping companies facilitate purpose. In his presentation, Arthur eloquently articulated the meaning of purpose (“Purpose is something that we gain daily from relationships, doing something greater than ourselves, and from personal and professional growth”), and documented the value and importance of purposeful workers.

At the end of this stimulating and important presentation I commented that the only thing missing from his presentation was a picture of Karl Marx. It’s common to popularly associate Marx with communism, but first and foremost Marx was a profound social theorist of work whose concern with workers’ suffering led him to seek a more humane society. He thought that the commodification of work under capitalism leads to the loss of one’s essential humanness, a loss that Marx labeled “alienation.” In his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx identified four ways in which workers are alienated under capitalism:

1. Individuals are divorced from the product of their labor—the business owns and controls what the workers produce.
2. Since business owners control how things are made, workers surrender control of their actions to someone else.
3. Creative work is seen as an essential feature of being human so #1 and #2 deprive humans of their essential nature.
4. Because people relate to each other through their work, they are alienated from each other.

If we set aside the fact that Marx’s alienation is inherent in capitalism and is not a subjective feeling of job dissatisfaction or a result of  undesirable job characteristics, in important ways the dimensions of alienation match Imperative’s emphasis on the importance of relationships, autonomy, and personal meaning in work. I think this is important because it reinforces the gravity of these issues, even if there are important differences. 

Imperative’s business case for organizations to embrace the importance of working with purpose is that purposeful workers are better workers. Since it is a business enterprise itself, I understand why Imperative makes this case. But there is an unsettling conundrum here in which the deep, non-instrumental importance of work is being justified on instrumental grounds. This seemingly implies that in cases where purposeful workers are not more productive, then imbuing work with greater meaning isn’t something important to pursue. Or that only purposeful workers are worthy of efforts to improve their working conditions. This is analogous to the problem with justifying corporate diversity programs solely by the business case (then these programs become subjected to the vagaries of executives’ perceptions of which employees, if any, are a source of competitive advantage, rather than diversity being seen as important for human reasons). From an industrial relations perspective in which labor is more than a commodity, the improvement of work (and diversity) is an important imperative for all workers, even when it doesn’t improve productivity or other instrumental outcomes.

Returning to Marx’s alienation, I raised this connection with Arthur as a way to emphasize that these are longstanding concerns in the world of work (so bravo!), and there have been numerous movements between Marx and now to try to give work and workers deeper meaning and respect (for example, the field of industrial relations). By bringing new data and case studies to the issue, I hope that Imperative can successfully expand upon earlier movements to embrace of the deep importance of work, which is also a goal of my book The Thought of Work. This is a deeply important issue, and a longstanding one. Unfortunately, history doesn’t seem to be on our side.

Happy May Day!

Working Like A Dog?

One of the Christmas gifts received in my dog-loving family was Dog Sense: How the New Science of Dog Behavior Can Make You A Better Friend to Your Pet by John Bradshaw (Basic Books, 2011). The book starts with the observation that "dogs today unwittingly find themselves on the verge of a crisis, struggling to keep up with the ever-increasing pace of change in human society" (p. xvii). Sounds a lot like the human struggle! And similar to the human struggle, work is an important part of this story.

To continue to quote from the opening of Dog Sense, "Until just over a hundred years ago, most dogs worked for their living. Each of the breeds or types had become well suited, over thousands of years and a corresponding number of generations, to the task for which they were bred....Their agility, quick thinking, keen senses, and unparalleled ability to communicate with humans suited them to an extraordinary diversity of tasks--hunting, herding, guarding, and many others, each an important component of the economy....Then, a few dozen generations ago, everything began to change...Indeed, an ever-increasing proportion of dogs are never expected to work at all; their sole function is to be family pets."

So why is this a problem? Because the fundamental behaviors and traits of dogs cannot be instantly changed to fit (unrealistic) human expectations. So Dog Sense describes the research on dog behavior to help us better understand their needs. I recommend this to anyone who enjoys dogs, but let's get back to the connection to work. I certainly don't want to claim literal parallels between the situations that people and dogs face (e.g., people should not be bred for certain tasks!), but at a more general level I think it is interesting to think about the fundamental importance of work for people and, at least historically, for dogs.

For both people and dogs, we should ask important questions about what happens when work disappears or is hard to come by. It appears that both people and dogs need meaningful engagement as part of a healthy life, and work can be a major source of opportunity for this engagement. When we lose sight of this and instead reduce work to simply a source of money, we can look to man's best friend as a reminder that work should be structured so that it can be about more than money. We need to create high-quality jobs to provide deeper rewards, not lousy jobs with excessive burdens. Otherwise, we'll just be "working like a dog."

What is Worker Well-Being?

The well-being of workers has long been an important issue. As industrialization became widespread in Britain, the United States, and elsewhere, early exposés by Friedrich Engels and Henry Mayhew, novels by Charles Dickens and Émile Zola, the photography of Lewis Hines, and diverse secular and religious reform movements focused attention on poverty wages and dangerous working conditions The academic field of industrial relations was born out of a deep unease with imbalances in the employment relationship that led to exploitative wages and working hours, arbitrary supervisory methods, and frequent industrial accidents. Concerns with worker well-being similarly underlie the early theorizing of Karl Marx, Georg Simmel, and others regarding the alienation of workers from their work, Max Weber's work on the repressive nature of bureaucracies, and Henri de Man's search for factors that enabled or prevented workers from fulfilling a variety of human needs such as activity, creation, and self-worth.

Fast forward to today, and many scholars, policymakers, advocates, and business leaders again embrace the importance of worker well-being. Once again, modern exposés such as Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickeled and Dimed illustrate the low pay, long working hours, and hazardous working conditions endured by some workers. But the scholarly work on worker well-being frequently adopts very different perspectives on how to define and measure worker well-being, and therefore comes to very different conclusions about whether well-being needs improving, and, if so, how to improve it. For some, worker well-being is a subjective concept based on workers' attitudinal evaluations of their work situations; for others, worker well-being is an objective issue evaluated against specific criteria. To make things even worse, studies from either approach frequently focus narrowly on specific aspects of well-being, such as physical health, psychological health, job characteristics, employee voice, pay and benefits, or economic insecurity.

David Spencer (University of Leeds) and I have just finished a paper ("Toward an Integrated and Interdisciplinary Approach to Worker Well-Being") in which we instead argue for an integrated and interdisciplinary approach to worker well-being. When real people work, their work consists of multiple aspects. Individuals in paid jobs likely experience elements of the economic concept of disutility when their work is stressful and conflicts with desires for more leisured pursuits. But also experience elements of the psychological concept of fulfillment when their work brings psychological rewards or pain when their work is experienced as arduous and unfulfilling, of identity creation and affirmation (either positive or negative), and perhaps sometimes elements of caring or serving others. Unpaid homemakers whose work involves a lot of caring responsibilities also experience disutility as some features of caring are stressful and take time away from valued leisured pursuits, fulfillment from the intrinsic rewards of caring for others, and aspects of identity development.

We therefore outline a broad approach to thinking about worker well-being that includes the following major dimensions: Pay and Benefits (e.g., an adequate income and conomic security); Safety, Health, and Body Work (e.g., protection against workplace hazards and unwanted intimacy); Psychological and Mental Health (e.g., positive levels of job satisfaction and avoidance of undue stress); Skill and Creativity (e.g., opportunities for skill development); Autonomy over Work (e.g., opportunities to control how and what work is done); Freedom, and Voice (e.g., freedom to quit, occupational choice, ability to form independent labor unions); Governance and Ownership (e.g., opportunities to participate in how work is managed); Nondiscrimination and Respect (e.g., nondiscrimination protections); Caring (e.g., opportunities for directly caring for others and avoidance of conflicts that prevent the fulfillment of caring responsibilities); and Serving Others (e.g., opportunities for directly serving others and avoidance of conflicts that interfere with ability to serve others). For more details, see our paper.

We hope that this spurs broader approaches to worker well-being that adequately reflect the sheer diversity of the roles of work in our lives, as well as the tremendous importance of work for individuals and the communities in which they live.