PREFACE

WFH (working from home) and RTO (return to office). Quiet quitting. The Great Resignation. These buzzwords show that work has become a hot topic.¹ The COVID-19 pandemic upended assumptions about where work occurs, and then labor shortages gave employees the leverage to negotiate better pay and working conditions—or to leave for a better job. Yet, at the same time, there is uneasy speculation about which jobs may soon be replaced by sophisticated AI programs.

I did not know any of these changes were on the horizon when I began my research with job seekers in California in the wake of the Great Recession of 2007–9. I wish I could brag that I had predicted these impending upheavals to working conditions, labor markets, and work meanings, but that would not be true.

I took a roundabout route to arrive at my topic of work meanings in the United States. For many years, I have been interested in how Americans think about the political and economic forces that shape their lives and the social policies that could address those forces. As part of my earlier research I talked to ordinary Americans about government social welfare programs and US immigration policies. However, few of these people were directly affected by the policies I asked them about.² For example, I asked Black and white North Carolinians about immigration, but none was an immigrant or had recent immigrants in his or her family. That made me wonder how Americans thought about policies and structural forces that mattered in their own lives.

It was 2011, and I had been living and working for a decade in southern California on the eastern edge of Los Angeles County. When I moved there, I felt an economic energy that contrasted with the East Coast metropolitan areas where I lived previously, which were still recovering from factory closings decades earlier. For those living elsewhere, Los Angeles may evoke images of beaches and Hollywood, but it and nearby Long Beach are also home to two of the busiest ports in the United States, the major points of entry for cargo containers from the Pacific Rim.³ From my town of Claremont, I can see trains and trucks carrying what is currently 40 percent of the nation’s goods to huge warehouses in the Inland Empire counties of San Bernardino and Riverside.⁴ In 2009 Los Angeles County was the nation’s leading regional center of manufacturing employment.⁵

Unfortunately, there is not enough housing for all the people attracted to southern California, and it was one of the regions hardest hit by the housing bubble that precipitated the Great Recession. Escalating home prices put pressure on potential buyers to purchase before prices rose even higher. Home buyers were vulnerable to shady lenders who were paid by the number of mortgages they processed, whether the borrowers could afford them or not. Everyone assumed that prices would keep rising, so no matter how much debt was incurred by buyers, it seemed as if they could always sell their homes for a profit. When house values plunged in 2008, jobs were lost in construction and finance and nearly every other sector due to the ripple effects of tight credit and of consumers having little disposable income.⁶ Although the economy was no longer in recession by 2011 when I began my research, unemployment rates were still higher than 12 percent in southern California.⁷ I decided to talk to unemployed southern Californians about the ways they coped with being out of work and the meanings of working and not working for them.

As a cultural anthropologist who conducts research in the United States, I had another reason for being interested in work meanings. I have encountered too many unfounded generalizations about Americans’ values and beliefs—generalizations that are repeated to justify the policies that the commentators favor. Work meanings are highly susceptible to these tendentious cultural descriptions. Observers on the Right see declines in workforce participation rates as evidence that government social welfare programs are weakening Americans’ work ethic.⁸ For some on the Left, long average workweeks are proof that Americans have been indoctrinated into devoting their lives to producing profits for others. Many commentators on both the Left and Right assume that most people would happily stop working if they could support themselves by other means, but this assumption fails to consider the meanings that people’s work has for them.

Work meanings are not a new topic for me. In my doctoral dissertation research in the mid-1980s, I interviewed employees of a Rhode Island chemical factory that had announced plans to close its doors, throwing nearly four hundred employees out of work.⁹ It was a time when factories were closing all over the US Northeast and Midwest. Twenty-five years later, I found myself circling back to some of the same topics I explored then, including how displaced workers think about the place of work in a good life. In my previous research, I discovered that some of the factory workers declined promotions into management roles. They perceived these positions as likely to diminish their free time and pit them against their fellow workers. That research led me to question blanket cultural generalizations about Americans wanting to get ahead above all else.¹⁰

Finding my interviewees for this book required a multipronged approach because in southern California in 2011 unemployment was not limited to a single company or even a single sector of the economy. I searched for activist groups organizing the unemployed, but there were none. Later, in the fall of 2011, the Occupy movement arose, including a large encampment in Los Angeles, but that movement was not limited to the concerns of those without work. In the past, researchers could try to talk to people waiting at unemployment offices, but now most applications are submitted online. I needed a different strategy to find unemployed southern Californians.

Fortunately, there were many places where job seekers gathered. I recruited some participants by standing outside job fairs and handing out flyers describing my project. However, all-purpose job fairs generally offer only low-wage jobs. To find workers from other socioeconomic levels, I attended career counseling sessions, including some sponsored by a local nonprofit organization, and a job club run by the San Bernardino County office of the California Employment Development Department. Those sessions catered to middle-income workers. Someone I met that way invited me to attend her accountability and support group of job seekers, several of whom participated in my project. To find unemployed managers and executives, I visited career counseling sessions organized by an executive outplacement firm. At each setting, the organizer kindly gave me a little time to describe my project. I met a few participants through mutual acquaintances, which offered the opportunity to talk to people who were not working but lacked the knowledge, ability, or motivation to attend career counseling sessions and job seeker accountability groups. To enhance socioeconomic diversity, I recruited participants from different parts of the region around Los Angeles—from the relatively wealthy suburbs of Orange County and the San Gabriel Valley to the inland Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario metropolitan area, which in 2012 had the highest poverty rate among large metropolitan areas in the United States.¹¹

My participants were diverse in other respects as well. Many earlier studies of US culture examined the experiences of the white, native-born, middle class. Studies of work meanings typically focused on men rather than women. There is nothing wrong with a narrow demographic focus if the researcher intends to illuminate the outlooks of just that slice of the public. Indeed, there is considerable value in attaining a deep understanding of one group. My dissertation research was with white, working-class men because they were the workforce of the Rhode Island chemical factory that was the focus of my study. By contrast, my research for this book took place in an ethnically diverse part of the United States, where more than one-fifth of the population are foreign born, and with the goal of illuminating what is shared and what varies in meanings of working and not working for men and women from differing backgrounds.¹² For help in finding and interviewing first-generation Latino/a immigrants, I hired a research assistant, Claudia Castañeda, a recent UCLA graduate and an immigrant from Guatemala, who interviewed eleven immigrants from Latin America. I recruited and interviewed some immigrants as well.

Together, we interviewed thirty-six women and twenty-eight men who varied in occupation, income, ethnic or racial identity, and country of origin.¹³ One was living in a homeless shelter when we met, and another would soon move to transitional housing for the homeless; by contrast, four had former annual household incomes of more than $500,000. The rest fell somewhere between these extremes of poverty and wealth.

Their previous jobs reflected the diverse local economy. The occupations of those without a bachelor’s degree included administrative assistant, construction worker, contractor, machine operator, landscaping worker, cashier, auto parts salesperson, housecleaner, waiter, massage therapist, hairdresser, customer service representative, home health aide, warehouse worker, and roofer. One participant had been released from prison a few years earlier following a long sentence for drug dealing; another was an Air Force veteran recently returned from deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. Some occupations of those with a college education were quality assurance supervisor, nonprofit program officer, plant manager, business-to-business salesperson, human resources executive, student adviser, grant professional, information technology recruiter, schoolteacher, special education teacher, loan underwriter, and financial officer (see the appendix for a more detailed description of the participants).

No one was looking for a first job, and most had a long work history. I discovered that career counseling sessions and accountability groups tend to attract middle-aged job seekers. Some of my participants were in their twenties and thirties, but most were in their forties or fifties. This method of recruitment also meant that my research underrepresents those who had withdrawn from the labor force. I interviewed just a few of them whom I had met through personal contacts; I did not interview adults who had never entered the labor force nor had any plans to do so.

Of the forms of diversity represented here, the inclusion of first-generation immigrants may raise the most questions for a study of cultural meanings in the United States. I included immigrants because they are a significant part of the nation. In 2010, 12.9 percent of the population of the United States was foreign born, a percentage nearing the high rate from 1900 to 1910 when immigrants comprised 13.6–14.7 percent of the US population.¹⁴ Images of ships carrying European immigrants past the Statue of Liberty are central to the popular imagination of the United States as a nation of immigrants.¹⁵ I hope that one day the current wave of immigrants from Latin America and Asia will be seen in the same positive light.

As it happens, all the immigrants in this book had lived in the United States for at least ten years. We did not ask about their immigration status, but everyone volunteered this information, from which we learned that all but two were either lawful permanent residents or citizens. Claudia C.’s interviews were conducted in Spanish; I conducted my interviews either in English or with the help of a friend or family member who translated.

Another reason I recruited immigrants for this research is that some of those who came as older teens or adults embraced what is called the “American dream,” the ideal shared by many immigrants and native born alike that the United States is a land of economic opportunity. How were their dreams affected by unemployment?

The interviews averaged six hours per person, spread over two or more initial meetings (usually at a coffee shop or restaurant) between the fall of 2011 and summer of 2012 and another lengthy follow-up interview two years later.¹⁶ Each of the first interviews began with the request, “Please tell me about your life, leading up to your situation now.” In addition to biographical information, their stories were interesting for the varying ways they narrated their lives and the importance they gave to their jobs and unemployment in their life stories. After sharing these stories, which usually consumed much of the first interview, we discussed the financial, social, and psychological impacts of being out of work and how they were coping. The second interview delved into the meanings of work and a good life for them, their explanations for why the recession occurred, how they would deal with the bad economy if it were up to them, and their opinions on related topics. In addition to the interviews, I stayed in touch informally with several participants through email and social media.

I also observed the career counseling, networking, and accountability group meetings where I recruited my participants. Two participants invited me to attend religious services with them, and I observed a session of a ministry for job seekers sponsored by the evangelical Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California. Those observations, along with earlier pilot interviews in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, informal conversations, and media commentary, all contributed to my understanding of Americans’ work meanings.

Many of my participants said the interviews were their first opportunity to talk about being out of work. Some voiced their experiences for documentary purposes, so that others would know what they had gone through. Others seemed to see it as therapy, an opportunity to express pent-up emotions. Some participants treated our interviews as one more networking event, another contact that might be useful to them. The small honorarium and free meal I offered may have been an attraction for a few. At a minimum, the interviews were an excuse to get out of the house, to give some structure to their day, to do something other than keep sending their resumes into the black hole of online job websites. Whatever their motives, all helped me, and, in return, I tried to help them in any way I could. Some asked me for advice about their resumes. I would explain that I was no expert, but I passed on tips I heard at the career counseling sessions I attended. Several were curious to hear how my other interviewees were coping, information I was happy to share while preserving confidentiality.

Even with their varied occupations and backgrounds, my participants had one thing in common: being unemployed gave them an epistemological break from working as a daily routine. As the political theorist Kathi Weeks comments, “When we have no memory or little imagination of an alternative to a life centered on work, there are few incentives to reflect on why we work as we do and what we might wish to do instead. Rather, our focus is generally confined to how, to draw on a famous phrase from another text, ‘we shall set to work and meet the demands of the day.’ ”¹⁷

The long-term unemployed did not have to imagine an alternative to a life centered on work; they were living it. Out of work for many months or years, they were forced to confront what work meant for them.

I had once been in the same situation as them, but strangely, it took me a while to remember that. In the summer of 2011, I was busy with preparations for this project, applying for funding and conducting pilot interviews.¹⁸ As I drove to a networking group meeting, I thought about how I should introduce myself. I suddenly remembered that twelve years earlier, I had been out of work myself. A tenured college professor, as I am now, has an unusually secure job. The tenure system protects teachers so they cannot be fired for expressing unpopular views. However, untenured professors—and the increasing number of adjunct faculty not on the tenure track—have insecure jobs. In the late 1990s I did not receive tenure in my first job, and I was out of work for a year before I was offered my current position.

Amid the minutiae of preparations for this project, I had forgotten that I had lived through the experiences I was planning to ask about. But then those memories started coming back to me. The letter announcing I had not received tenure, which seemed to come out of the blue when I thought I was doing very well. The injury to my self-esteem and threat to my professional identity. The much-appreciated courtesy appointment at another university, which did not provide a salary but gave me the cover of professional standing, like the consulting businesses some of my college-educated interviewees started—which, as one of my participants explained candidly, was just smoke and mirrors to make it look like she was working. The camaraderie with other anthropologists who reached out to tell me that they too had been denied tenure in their first job. And the stories I told myself, and which others told me, that there was bound to be a silver lining in these experiences. Perhaps losing my job was a lesson in humility that would make me a better person.

I did not delve into personal details that summer day when I introduced myself to the networking group. However, those difficult memories come back to me now as I am writing, and they help me better understand some of my interviewees’ thoughts and feelings. Some of our reactions, including the impulse to put a positive spin on a negative situation and seek larger meanings in it, draw on ways of interpreting difficulties that are widely shared in this society but are not found everywhere. In other words, they are cultural. The fact that I had forgotten that I too had experienced long-term unemployment reminds me to put job loss in perspective as only one chapter—and not necessarily the most important one—in a life story.

My experience also underscores the fact that cultural meanings are not uniform. Many of my participants thought about being out of work differently from the way I did when I was unemployed. Not only were their income needs and job prospects unlike mine but so were their previous experiences, career goals, life projects, and understandings about the forces that govern our lives.

I now have another personal connection to my topic of the meanings of working and not working. My son, who is in his early thirties, has not had a steady job for several years because he is spending all his time trying to start an online business. His path is an entirely different way of launching a career from my more conventional get-a-graduate-degree-then-look-for-a-job route.¹⁹ The differences between his work goals and mine are a reminder I live with every day that meanings of work vary—even within families. My primary goal in this book is to illuminate some of the key differences I found in Americans’ cultural meanings of working and not working.