CHAPTER 2 Two Protestant Work Ethics (Living to Work or Working Diligently)

In The Problem with Work, the political theorist Kathi Weeks asks, “Why do we [in the United States] work so long and so hard?” She argues that Americans often work long hours not for the sensible purpose of making enough money to pay for our expenses. Instead, most Americans are driven by a less rational motivation: we have been socialized to believe that our job should be central to our identities and an all-consuming interest. The result is that Americans do not simply “work to live” but we “live for work.” Weeks argues that despite all the economic changes over the last four centuries, Americans are still haunted by the Protestant work ethic described by Max Weber.¹

Yet, do all Americans “live for work?” Who is the “we” Weeks assumes as her typical American?

Weeks may have in mind the sorts of people she encounters at her university—professors like her or me. Professors not in a tenure-track position and those who do not yet have tenure labor feverishly to compile an excellent record of teaching, scholarship, and service so they can keep their jobs. Later in life, many professors who have the job security of tenure continue to devote their weekends and vacations to research and publication, new course preparation, or administrative work. I know that I am typical of many academics in choosing to work far more hours than I need to.

Many of our students also work hard. Some faced considerable competition to get into college, and they have uncertain prospects after they graduate. One of my students told me it is common for students at our selective liberal arts college to announce that they had stayed up to 3:00 A.M. to get all their work done. She felt there was a competition to see who could work the hardest.² To illustrate her point, she showed me this tweet, “How to know you’ve internalized capitalism”:

—you determine your worth based on your productivity
—you feel guilty for resting
—your primary concern is to make yourself profitable
—you neglect your health
—you think “hard work” is what brings happiness.³

This tweet received thousands of retweets and likes. My student said she had to fight off her guilty feelings when she took time for herself, and she thought that description applied to many of her peers.

Successful entrepreneurs work long hours as well, and they proclaim that their 80+-hour workweeks are necessary for anyone who wants to achieve what they have. For example, Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla, tweeted to his millions of followers, “Nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week.” The correct number of hours “varies per person,” he continued, but is “about 80 sustained, peaking about 100 at times.” Marissa Mayer, the former chief executive of Yahoo, said a 130-hour workweek was possible “if you’re strategic about when you sleep, when you shower, and how often you go to the bathroom.”⁴ There is a popular t-shirt worn by Silicon Valley employees proclaiming, “9 to 5 is for the weak.”⁵ One contestant on a reality television show, Planet of the Apps, on which app developers compete to win venture capital funding, stated, “I rarely get to see my kids. That’s a risk you have to take.”⁶ Recently, Alexis Ohanian, the founder of Reddit, warned the tech community that such comments are “one of the most toxic, dangerous things in tech right now.” He said, “This idea that unless you are suffering, grinding, working every hour of every day, you’re not working hard enough” was what led him to neglect the depression he was suffering while he was building his business. He called bragging about hard work “hustle porn.”⁷

From a cross-cultural and historical perspective, it is unusual for the well-off to boast of working constantly. As the late nineteenth-century economist Thorstein Veblen observed, “conspicuous leisure” conventionally signaled wealth and conferred greater status than constant work.⁸ Recently, however, researchers have observed the opposite norm among upper-income salaried workers in the United States: a “conspicuous consumption of time” devoted to paid work.⁹

Average work hours of full-time, nonagricultural workers have fallen considerably over the last hundred years in Europe, Australia, and the United States from about sixty-five hours a week in 1870 to a little fewer than forty hours a week in 2000.¹⁰ However, many US workers receiving a fixed salary rather than an hourly wage are currently working at or near nineteenth-century levels. In a recent survey, one-quarter of US salaried workers reported working fifty to fifty-nine hours a week, and another quarter said they worked sixty or more hours a week. Although eighty-plus-hour workweeks are unusual, there are “time-greedy professions” like law, finance, and consulting, where sixty- to eighty-hour workweeks are expected if employees want to get ahead.¹¹

What about everyone else? In the same survey, only 26 percent of those paid hourly in full-time jobs worked fifty or more hours a week. Over two-thirds of full-time hourly wage earners worked a more moderate forty to forty-nine hours a week, compared to just under half of salaried employees.¹² Many workers could not work at their jobs at all hours even if they wanted to. If you are a sales associate, or meat-processing plant worker, or work in an online retailer’s fulfillment center, you cannot bring your work home. You may work extra shifts to earn a living wage or to afford a higher standard of living, but those are instrumental reasons for working (what I call working to live or working to live well), rather than working because your work is central to your identity and interests (living to work). Or you may work long hours only because it is a job requirement, and you would work less if you could. If that is your situation, you are not working long hours because you live for your work.

Living to work is one version of a productivist ideology, and that broader ideology does have a strong hold in the United States.¹³ Like the social theorist Anthony Giddens, I define productivism as the ideology that one’s self-esteem and social worth should depend on one’s work effort.¹⁴ If you hold productivist values, you feel guilty when you are not productive. You admire hard workers and look down on those you consider lazy. If you are successful, you attribute your success to your hard work, rather than to any advantages you had from your family, social connections, or lucky opportunities. Many of my participants judged their moral worth by their work effort. Many also valued staying busy. However, I noticed that they practiced two distinct ways of valuing productivity and busyness. Some believed they should work conscientiously or stay busy in other ways during fixed, regular hours; others willingly worked longer hours because they aspired to high levels of achievement in their careers. I call the first a diligent 9-to-5 work ethic and the second a living-to-work ethic.¹⁵ These two versions of a productivist work ethic set different life priorities when workers had a job, and they fostered different feelings and approaches to their job search when they were unemployed.

Those who had a diligent 9-to-5 work ethic took pride in being good workers, disdained lazy people, and missed the routine of going to work. Still, they were not workaholics: it was important to them to maintain boundaries between work time and the rest of their lives. While they were unemployed, they tried to keep busy and productive during working hours to maintain a division between work time and nonwork time.

By contrast, many of those who had lived to work before they lost their jobs discovered through their unemployment that they could find fulfillment from other activities. They said that their journey of unemployment made them reconsider their priorities. Contemporary values of work-life balance and wellness helped these formerly high-achieving participants adjust to not working.

It is paradoxical. Those who had previously guarded their private time missed the daily routine of working. Those who had spent most of their waking hours working were more likely to say they appreciated taking a break. You might think that those who had a living-to-work ethic would be more upset by being out of work than those who had a diligent 9-to-5 work ethic, but that is not what they reported.

I have implied that these work ethics correlate with the kinds of jobs people hold: entrepreneurs, as well as salaried managers and professionals, have a living-to-work ethic, whereas hourly workers have a diligent 9-to-5 work ethic. That is close but not completely accurate. What makes this distinction a good first approximation are the regulations of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), which classify workers as either exempt or nonexempt. Employers are required to pay overtime to nonexempt workers if they work more than forty hours a week, but exempt workers do not receive overtime pay. (They are called “exempt” because the FLSA provisions do not apply to them.) Exempt workers have a fixed salary rather than an hourly wage, and they have supervisory and management duties, so their jobs are at a higher level in the organization than nonexempt workers. At present, employees who are paid less than $35,568 per year are nonexempt.¹⁶ If nonexempt workers “lived to work,” they would be entitled to a 150 percent pay rate for their extra hours, so many employers limit their overtime opportunities (or force them to work off the clock). By contrast, employers can demand that their exempt employees work longer than forty hours a week without having to pay them more. Ideal exempt employees, from the employer’s perspective, voluntarily work extra hours because they are devoted to their job.

Still, not all managers and professionals have a living-to-work ethic. In chapter 1, I gave the example of Robert Milner, a supply chain strategist earning more than $80,000 a year, who was unhappy with the long hours expected of an exempt employee. Robert even stated, “Although I work to live, I don’t live to work.” Several other managers and professionals I talked to also explicitly rejected a living-to-work ethic. Conversely, one does not need to be a manager or professional to have a living-to-work ethic. Consider the example of Isabel Navarro in chapter 1. Isabel began as a low-paid clerical worker, but she devoted all her vacation time to taking coursework that would qualify her for the best-paid clerical position. When she was forced out of that job, she again devoted her free time to learning advanced techniques in her new occupation of skin care. Isabel went on to start her own skin care salon. Business owners, regardless of the size of the business, often devote long hours to their work. Isabel had a living-to-work ethic. The same was true of ReNé McKnight, whom I also described in chapter 1: she was a self-described “workaholic” and would-be entrepreneur who had been working as a customer service representative and as a home health aide.

Other participants did not have a productivist work ethic in either the diligent 9-to-5 or living-to-work senses. That does not mean they had no interest in working. A productivist work ethic is about devotion to abstract labor; that is, devotion to being a good worker regardless of the particulars of the job or how much money one makes. Some of my participants did not care about work in this abstract sense. For them, what mattered most was earning money to support themselves and others in their household at the standard of living they desired, socializing with coworkers, or being occupied with meaningful or enjoyable assignments. They will be described in later chapters. Earning enough to support oneself and others, afford a desired standard of living, socializing with coworkers, and enjoyment of the tasks were also common motivations for those with a living-to-work or diligent 9-to-5 work ethic.

Why should one be devoted to being a good worker, regardless of the job or how much money one makes? Kathi Weeks and many others trace productivist thinking to the Protestant work ethic described by Max Weber. Thus, we need to revisit Weber’s description of this work ethic to understand not only what it illuminates but also what it obscures.

Weber on the Two Protestant Work Ethics

In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, published in 1904 and 1905, the German sociologist Max Weber attempts to explain “the origin of the Western bourgeois class and of its peculiarities.”¹⁷ By “bourgeois class,” he means business owners, whose greatest peculiarity was the way they used their time, devoting all of it to their business without relaxing to enjoy the fruits of their efforts.

Weber contrasts this ethos with what he calls a traditionalistic spirit, which he illustrates using the example of European cloth merchants in the preindustrial putting-out system. In the putting-out system, cloth merchants bought fabric made by farm families in their homes and sold it to middlemen. The relationships between buyers and sellers, the prices paid, and the expected quality of the cloth were set by custom. Weber’s description of these traditionalistic merchants emphasizes their plentiful free time: “The number of business hours was very moderate, perhaps five to six a day, sometimes considerably less; in the rush season, where there was one, more.… A long daily visit to the tavern, with often plenty to drink, and congenial circle of friends, made life comfortable and leisurely.”¹⁸

Then, as Weber tells the story, “this leisureliness was suddenly destroyed” by one or more hard-driving young men who upped the ante by asking cloth buyers what they wanted, closely supervising the cloth makers to ensure they provided what the buyers wanted, and selling a higher volume of fabric at lower prices, which forced the other merchants to do likewise or go out of business: “The idyllic state collapsed under the pressure of a bitter competitive struggle … The old leisurely and comfortable attitude toward life gave way to a hard frugality in which some participated and came to the top, because they did not wish to consume but to earn.”¹⁹

The competitive new merchants would not have been popular, and their approach required “infinitely more intensive work.”²⁰ Weber asks what motivated those new merchants.

You may be thinking at this point that what motivated them was the desire to make more money and that no further explanation is needed. Weber would reply that you are thinking with a modern capitalist mindset. Why should people prefer to earn more and more money, without end—especially if their goal is not to have more money to spend but only to reinvest in their business? He considered the traditionalistic ethos more natural: “A man does not ‘by nature’ wish to earn more and more money, but simply to live as he is accustomed to live and to earn as much as is necessary for that purpose.”²¹

Weber’s surprising explanation for the rise of the competitive business spirit is that these new businessmen were adherents of the ascetic Protestantism of the sixteenth-century theologian John Calvin. Calvinists believed that only those chosen by God for salvation could work effectively to increase the glory of God through their worldly callings; thus, success at work is a sign that one is among the elect who have been saved and will go to heaven after they die. For the ascetic Protestants, including the English Puritans, “Waste of time is … the first and in principle the deadliest of sins.”²² The seventeenth-century English Puritan minister Richard Baxter said one must do God’s work “ ‘as long as it is yet day’ ” because idle hands can get into mischief and one has only a short lifetime to labor for God’s glory on earth: one can rest all one wants in the next life. In Weber’s explanation of this view, “Not leisure and enjoyment, but only activity serves to increase the glory of God.”²³ As a result, “Loss of time through sociability, idle talk, luxury, even more sleep than is necessary for health, six to at most eight hours, is worthy of absolute moral condemnation.”²⁴

Weber did not think a concern with salvation motivated Western business owners much beyond the 1600s, although for at least two more centuries they continued to believe they had a moral duty to devote all their time to their business. That version of productivism was summed up by aphorisms like “time is money” published by Benjamin Franklin in his Poor Richard’s Almanac in the mid-eighteenth century. What Franklin meant is that someone who could earn “ten shillings a day by his labour” but takes off a half-day has “thrown away” five shillings. Not working has an opportunity cost. That attitude lives on in metaphors of “saving,” “spending,” and “wasting” time, which reflect a cultural model of time as a scarce resource we ought to conserve, as George Lakoff and Mark Johnson point out in Metaphors We Live By.²⁵ Franklin also advised appearing to be busy from early in the morning until late at night to give lenders the confidence their loans would be repaid.²⁶

Weber believed that an internalized duty to work was waning by the beginning of the twentieth century when he wrote about the Protestant ethic. By that time, he felt that personal values and beliefs no longer mattered because industrial capitalism had become so entrenched in the West that everyone had to conform to its discipline: “The idea of duty in one’s calling prowls about in our lives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs,” and “in the field of its highest development, in the United States, the pursuit of wealth” had been “stripped of its religious and ethical meaning” and had “the character of sport.”²⁷

Weber also observed a shift from Puritans’ reluctance to spend their hard-earned money. Their suspicion of consumerism was based on their belief that “man is only a trustee of the goods which have come to him through God’s grace” and thus should not “spend any of it for a purpose which does not serve the glory of God but only one’s own enjoyment.”²⁸ Attitudes about consumerism had changed by the beginning of the twentieth century when “material goods … gained an increasing and finally an inexorable power over the lives of men,” becoming an “iron cage.”²⁹

Despite these changes, a key feature of modern Western bourgeois culture persisted: the centrality of work in a businessperson’s life. They lived to work rather than working to live. No longer motivated by concern for their salvation, these modern businesspeople could not explain what drove them: “If you ask them what is the meaning of their restless activity, why they are never satisfied with what they have, thus appearing so senseless to any purely worldly view of life, they would perhaps give the answer, if they know any at all: ‘to provide for my children and grandchildren.’ But more often and, since that motive is not peculiar to them, but was just as effective for the traditionalist [who worked to live], more correctly, simply: that business with its continuous work has become a necessary part of their lives.”³⁰ In other words, their habits, values, identities, and self-esteem all depended on constantly working, being productive, and achieving success. Weber realized that wealth could bring influence and higher status, but his ideal-typical businessperson (the owner of a small business, not a tycoon) “gets nothing out of his wealth for himself, except the irrational sense of having done his job well.”³¹

Weber uses words like “irrational” and “peculiar” to describe the ethic of living to work, in which the goal is “the earning of more and more money, combined with the strict avoidance of all spontaneous enjoyment of life.”³² In Weber’s description of this ascetic ethic, work itself is not expected to bring happiness nor is the point to earn money that will be enjoyed later. Weber asks why people should devote all their time to something that does not increase their happiness. That was the irrationality Weber saw at the heart of the Puritan work ethic. Weber thought the ethos of Western businesspeople was strange, and among Western businesspeople, he thought that ethos had reached its apogee in the United States. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism reflects Weber’s culture shock as a German intellectual contemplating the values and life choices of American businesspeople.³³

As an explanation for the rise of modern capitalism, Weber’s story is controversial. There is no shortage of historical, theological, sociological, and anthropological studies showing problems with his analysis.³⁴ Nor is a hardworking, entrepreneurial ethos limited to Protestants or to the West.³⁵ And yet, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism remains an incomparable, searing description of a consequential mindset. Kathi Weeks is just one of many influenced by “Weber’s brilliant study of how … we came to be haunted by the legacy of this Puritan ethic.”³⁶

I, too, am fascinated by Weber’s depiction of this ethos. My late father-in-law fit his description of a businessperson with few interests in life other than making and saving money, and Weber helped me understand him. Moreover, Weber’s emphasis on people’s values and meanings influenced the kind of anthropology I do. However, an ambiguity lies at the heart of his description of this work ethic. Did Weber mean to describe only the mindset of businesspeople, or did he intend to include their employees as well? In most enterprises, workers do not share in the profits of the business: Are they as driven as those who derive greater financial benefits from unceasing labor? Given Weber’s interest in “the origin of the Western bourgeois class and of its peculiarities,” he devoted scant attention to the inner life of ordinary working people. Yet, in The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism there is a suggestion of another, less driven, work ethic that is more relevant for ordinary workers. That hint is Weber’s description of an earlier stage in the development of Protestant attitudes about work, beginning with the pre-Calvinist Protestant theology of Martin Luther. Weber’s treatise is really a description of two Protestant work ethics, not one.

In Weber’s account, the Protestant ethic began with Martin Luther. Luther rejected the then-prevalent Christian theology that the best life in God’s eyes was one devoted to religion. Instead, Luther preached that “the fulfilment of worldly duties is under all circumstances the only way to live acceptably to God … hence every legitimate calling has exactly the same worth.”³⁷ Thus, Martin Luther expanded the notion of a “calling” from a religious vocation to one’s God-given work in the world. As Weber explains Luther’s ideas, “Labour must … be performed as if it were an absolute end in itself, a calling.”³⁸ In other words, workers in every occupation should perform their work as if they had been called to do it by God, even if they fell into their occupations because they had no choice.

Weber stated that among ordinary workers, as with entrepreneurs, treating one’s job as a calling led to a move from traditionalism; that is, from being content with one’s customary standard of living and working only as needed to maintain it. Traditionalistic workers receiving a piece rate had the tendency to quit when they had earned what they needed, even if they had not finished their assigned task. Even when they put in a full day, they might not have put much thought or effort into their work. By contrast, devout Protestant employees in the seventeenth century took it to be their duty to work hard and well in their worldly vocation.³⁹ Weber noticed that inculcating workers with this work ethic fattened the business owner’s bottom line: “The power of religious asceticism provided him … with sober, conscientious, and unusually industrious workmen.” With heavy sarcasm, Weber commented, “It appears here that the interests of God and of the employers are curiously harmonious.”⁴⁰

Being conscientious during normal working hours is not the same as devoting most of one’s time to one’s job: these two forms of productivism do not lend themselves to the same kind of exploitation. Luther’s conception of a worldly calling was “fulfilment of the obligations imposed upon the individual by his position in the world.”⁴¹ “Obligations” suggests an agreed-on, fixed set of tasks. Once workers discharged those obligations, their work was done, and they were free to enjoy the rest of their time. That is completely different from the anxious, restless Puritan work ethic with its suspicion of leisure. In the Puritan work ethic, there is always more work one could do.

Although Weber focused on the Protestant departure from Catholicism, he also made distinctions among Protestants. When he spoke of “the Protestant ethic,” he really meant ascetic Calvinist Protestantism, best represented by the Puritans in England and in what became the United States. He noted “the lesser degree of ascetic penetration of life in Lutheranism as distinguished from Calvinism.”⁴² Lutheranism was the largest Protestant denomination in Germany, in contrast to the United States, with the result, according to Weber, that Germans were more relaxed than Americans. Weber believed that even facial expressions of Germans and Anglo-Americans were different, with German facial expressions reflecting “Gemütlichkeit (good nature) or ‘naturalness,’ ” while Anglo-American facial expressions reflected “narrowness, unfreeness, and inner constraint” shaped by their Puritan heritage.⁴³

To sum up, although it was not his main point, Weber in effect described two Protestant work ethics, an early Protestant work ethic and a later, Puritan work ethic. Even though the stringent Puritan work ethic is what Weber and subsequent scholars emphasized, it is not clear that it ever motivated most workers, even in the United States. Both work ethics are productivist, but they espouse different versions of productivism, as I explain in greater detail.

I see in my participants’ diligent 9-to-5 work ethic the continuing influence of the early Protestant work ethic. This ethic calls for workers to be industrious during their normal working hours. It is an ethic held by employees who value doing their jobs well but are happy to stop at the end of the workday. By contrast, my participants with a living-to-work ethic share the drive for high achievement, work centrality, and long hours of Weber’s businesspeople driven by the Puritan work ethic.

That is not to say that either version of Weber’s Protestant work ethic is completely apt at the present time. As Weber explained, attitudes about consumerism changed quite a bit (and perhaps earlier than Weber thought, as I explain in the next chapter). What is also missing from Weber’s account of Puritans’ “avoidance of all spontaneous enjoyment of life”⁴⁴ is any possibility that workers could enjoy doing their jobs. What are the contemporary forms of the early Protestant work ethic versus the more extreme Puritan work ethic?

Unemployment among Those Who Live to Work Today

Lisa Rose had worked her way up in the nonprofit sector. When she was in her mid-forties, she was hired to be the vice president of a well-known Los Angeles nonprofit. She loved being in that world and was dedicated to the goals of the organization, even though she encountered resistance from the longtime professional staff she was supposed to lead. She earned a six-figure salary, more than her husband made, and they had no children. Lisa estimated that “probably 85 percent of it [my time] was work.” During the Great Recession, the organization’s endowment lost much of its value, and they let her go. When we met for the first interview, Lisa had been out of work for a year and a half.

As Lisa got to this point in her life story, she surprised me by saying, “Being laid off was the best thing that ever happened to me.” I replied, “Really?” She then explained why she felt that way:

Because it gave me a chance to take a look at what was the role of work in my life. It was too strong, too big a dimension. I’d let work become too big a part of who I saw myself to be. And in the absence of having a job, you see this much more starkly than when you’re working. You don’t realize how much of your identity gets invested in who you are and what you do and all of that. […] it’s like you’ve got this pie chart, and probably 85 percent of it was work. I mean, don’t ever let that happen again. That can’t happen again.

This is a remarkable statement from someone who had previously lived to work: it is a repudiation of putting one’s career ahead of all else.

One of the negative outcomes was neglect of her health: “I wasn’t taking good care of myself. So, I immediately leapt into regular exercise every day, eating better, spending time with friends and family, taking long walks with my dogs.” Being “healthy” required more than regular exercise. It also meant changing what mattered in life. The jolt of long-term unemployment led Lisa to believe that, by devoting 85 percent of her time to work, she had lost her true identity and needed to regain it to “remind myself of who I was when I was younger and try to recapture that essence of who I was.” She talked about establishing a “healthy” relationship to work: “Getting my strongest sense of who I am from work is something I have to change. And that’s a good thing to change, so if I’ve lost a sense of identity because I don’t have the same work anymore, I think it’s healthy for me. Not easy but healthy.”

There was a moral element to her new priorities. Lisa was ashamed of having neglected people she cared about. She said, “I also started to think about people whom I hadn’t seen in a long time, where I needed to strengthen those relationships, so I did. People I needed to apologize to, people I needed to make amends to.” She hoped that by making amends she would “feel more worthy in a way.” Lisa was grateful that while she was unemployed, she had time to care for her mother-in-law who had moved nearby. She also went on a retreat to try “to recover some elements of spirituality in my life.”

Lisa is a good example of someone who used to have a living-to-work ethic: work was very central to her interests and identity, and she willingly and regularly devoted long hours to her work.⁴⁵ “Work centrality” is a standard term in occupational psychology, inspired by Weber’s description of the Puritan work ethic: it refers to how important work is in someone’s life. Psychologists measure it by seeing how much someone agrees with statements like “the major satisfaction in my life comes from my work” or disagrees with statements like “my work is only a small part of who I am.”⁴⁶

Lisa’s repudiation of making work her highest priority was repeated by several others who had previously had a living-to-work ethic. These are people who said of themselves, “My career was my life” or that they had been “such a workaholic.” Pepper Hill, another former nonprofit administrator, could find only part-time work for more than six years. In the past, work had been central to her identity, but she was trying to change. She appreciated her therapist’s advice, “We’re human beings, not human doings.” In other words, her core identity should not depend on what she does. When I asked Elizabeth Montgomery, who had sold high-end office furniture, if she agreed with the statement, “Work is central to my identity,” she responded, “It was extremely central to my identity. This time off has made me look at myself differently.” She started to question whether putting “100 percent” of her time into her job might be out of balance. She said she had to learn, “Don’t be the workaholic. Put it in perspective.” She mused, “I lived in the future,” always “yearning to do better, better, better.” Now she was trying to “live in the day to day,” to appreciate “the journey” instead of striving to reach a set destination. When I asked Stacie McCarthy, a former loan processor, whether there was anything she was not so proud of in her life, she said, “Maybe I’m not so proud that I made it [my career] my life,” instead of spending more time with her parents and siblings. Abel Jimenez lost his successful produce market when he failed to pay all the taxes he owed. Although that was a financial disaster, he saw a benefit of not working so hard: “Life is so beautiful, and one doesn’t know how to live it. You understand? You get too deep into work, you think work is everything. You think that everything will be solved just by working and nothing else. Now I’m looking at it from a different life, which I might have missed previously.” He was spending time with his grandchild, a luxury he did not afford himself when his children were young.

Not everyone who had lived to work when employed later repudiated those priorities when they were out of work. Several participants said work was still central to their identity. They had held demanding jobs that probably required long hours, but they did not label themselves as reformed workaholics nor say they now regretted the time they had devoted to their jobs.⁴⁷ Still, it is striking that many others did express those regrets.

It has probably occurred to you, as it did to me, that Lisa Rose and the others I quoted might be saying they learned important lessons from losing their job as a way of finding something positive about their situation to help deal with the stress of long-term unemployment. In chapter 1, I discussed the positive thinking ideology that is common in the United States, which encourages looking for the positive aspects of negative circumstances. Lisa’s and others’ “blessing in disguise” framing of their job loss is a form of positive thinking I heard frequently in this study.⁴⁸

That may be true, but it does not make their new outlook any less sincere. Lisa, for one, did change her priorities. Initially she was forced to work less because her first regular job after her long period of unemployment was nonexempt. Her employer restricted her work hours to forty hours a week so they did not have to pay her overtime. Later, Lisa was promoted into an exempt position, and I wondered whether she would return to devoting 85 percent of her time to work. I got in touch to ask how she was balancing work with the rest of her life following her promotion, and Lisa replied at length. When she had been in the nonexempt position, she had to electronically punch in four times a day, which conflicted with her self-image as a professional: “As a professional it’s annoying because I don’t think of myself as being on the clock.” Yet, she acknowledged the benefits: “At the same time it kept me from working too many hours. Now that I’m in charge of my time I have to be more vigilant about my hours and watch the weekend work.” Still, she was proud that she had recently taken two weeks off in the middle of an important work project to deal with a family matter. She realized, “Family first and asking for help is OK.”

Similarly, Stacie McCarthy said she no longer spent her free time on her loan processing work in the new job she obtained after her long period of unemployment. It had never been expected in her position, but she had been devoted to her previous job and her boss. Now, she said, “I just wanna go in and do my job and go home.”

Living to Work Meets Self-Growth and Self-Care

Those who had lived to work and then questioned their former priorities did not have to invent a new way of thinking. In the contemporary United States, there are popular discourses that critique putting work above all else. Discourses of wellness and “work-life balance” provide respected alternative cultural models in which work plays a reduced role. We can see the influence of those discourses in my interviewees’ comments about establishing a “healthier” relationship to work.

In The Hearts of Men, Barbara Ehrenreich describes a shift in psychotherapy that began in the 1950s. Proponents of humanistic psychology, like Abraham Maslow, aim to maximize psychological health, not just cure mental illness. Humanistic psychotherapists believe that human growth requires fulfilling your individual potential instead of blindly conforming to conventional social obligations. Fritz Perls advocates, “Do your own thing,” see life as an adventure and reject guilt as an “obsolete emotion.” From this humanistic psychotherapeutic perspective, losing one’s job can be a “growth experience.”⁴⁹

Although “do your own thing” now rings of the countercultural movement of the late 1960s, broader ideas of “health” and “wellness,” which go beyond the absence of disease to encompass life satisfaction,⁵⁰ are now widely accepted in the United States. So are some elements of New Age beliefs and practices, such as meditation.⁵¹ Indeed, many of my participants practiced meditation and yoga.

Concerns with wellness can be co-opted by corporations seeking to improve their employees’ productivity.⁵² Managers hope that encouraging employees to do yoga or take a walk during their lunch break will make them more willing to work late and will reduce health insurance costs. Still, there are influential discourses that reverse those priorities, making health the master value instead of work productivity. The very term “workaholic,” a portmanteau of “work” and “alcoholic,” pathologizes people who work long hours and cannot stop thinking about their work. According to one psychologist quoted by the health website WebMD, “A workaholic is someone who is on the ski slopes dreaming about being back in the office. A healthy worker is someone in the office who dreams about being on the ski slopes.”⁵³ Workaholism is considered an addiction, an “ ‘uncontrollable need to work incessantly’ ” according to one definition,⁵⁴ just as alcoholism is “continued excessive or compulsive use of alcoholic drinks,” according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Workaholics have their own twelve-step programs.⁵⁵

A “healthy” relationship to work means creating “work-life balance.”⁵⁶ This term gained favor in the 1990s as more inclusive than “work-family” policies because workers who do not have family responsibilities still want time for activities outside work. Calls for work-life balance “capture a widely felt need to prevent paid work from invading too much into people’s lives,” especially for white-collar workers who are expected to be digitally available to their employers at all hours.⁵⁷

Although concerns with work-life balance are not limited to parents of young children, they are especially acute for them. For such parents, pressure to spend long hours at their jobs competes with expectations that they also devote considerable time to parenting. One of my participants, Anastasia Tang, was fired from her HR manager job a few months after she finished maternity leave. She believes she was let go because she declined to attend two after-hours company functions, including the annual company dinner, because she wanted to be home with her sons, who were younger than two years old. Parents like Anastasia and her husband face difficult choices, especially given current parenting norms. Today, parents are expected to closely watch their young children. Furthermore, especially among members of the middle and upper-middle class, worries about their children’s uncertain future drive parents to give their children enriching experiences that will later give them an edge in entrance to top colleges.⁵⁸ Anastasia told me she did not have reliable childcare for events after work, but her decision not to obtain a backup sitter for such events also reflects her preference for limiting her work hours so she could spend more time with her sons. Like Anastasia, several of my participants appreciated having more time to become involved with their children’s activities while they were unemployed.

In sum, there are many contemporary discourses and practices that reject long working hours. Still, if those counter-discourses and practices are so influential, why did my participants spend so much time at their work before they lost their jobs?

Why Work Long Hours?

To be sure, many Americans do not work long hours because they live to work but because they must do so to keep their jobs. As I explained earlier, the United States has no overtime protections for exempt workers. The result is many unhappy workers like my participant Robert Milner, who was “bitter” about having little free time after his ten-hour-or-longer workdays and minimum hour-long commutes in each direction. The United States also has no regulations on the length of a workweek. By contrast, the European Union mandates an average workweek of no longer than forty-eight hours in all member states, with exceptions for only a few occupations.⁵⁹

One researcher studied a consulting firm, one of the “time-greedy professions” in which sixty- to eighty-hour workweeks are expected. Employees who asked for less travel or a lighter schedule would be punished with a poor performance evaluation or denied a promotion. Instead, some employees “passed” by teleworking, taking on more local clients, collaborating with others on their team to jointly manage their hours, and controlling information regarding their whereabouts. They were as productive as those who worked longer hours, and they received good performance evaluations and promotions.⁶⁰

Women in male-dominated fields and people of color in white-dominated organizations may feel particularly strong pressures to work long hours.⁶¹ My participant Caroline James rose to be a senior vice president of HR for an entertainment company in which there were only three female executives in a workforce of more than two thousand. She said she had to deal with being dismissed by bigwigs whose attitude seemed to be, “Oh little girl, you’re funny. Go away. Don’t bug me.” She had been working seventy or more hours a week in an effort to be taken seriously. Eventually she realized this was hurting her marriage, and she stopped trying to base her self-worth on her bosses’ opinion of her.

Yet, none of the participants I quoted earlier who said they now regretted having devoted so much time to work—Lisa Rose, Pepper Hill, Elizabeth Montgomery, Stacie McCarthy, and Abel Jimenez—gave any hints in their life history of having disliked their long hours while they were immersed in their jobs. Their narratives suggest what some occupational psychologists would term positive work engagement, rather than guilt or fear-driven workaholism.

Some psychologists define workaholism as “the tendency to work excessively hard in a compulsive way.”⁶² As one source explains, “For workaholics, the need to work is so exaggerated that it endangers their health, reduces their happiness, and deteriorates their interpersonal relations and social functioning.”⁶³ Workaholism is work centrality driven by anxiety and guilt. It is assessed by agreement with statements like “I feel guilty when I take time off work” or “Do you immerse yourself in activities to change how you feel or avoid grief, anxiety, and shame?” Work engagement, by contrast, describes interest in one’s current job. It is a positive form of work centrality assessed by agreement with statements like “I am enthusiastic about my job” and “I am immersed in my work.” Some organizational psychologists find that those with high work engagement put in long hours just like workaholics, but they enjoy work more, have better mental and physical health, and describe higher life satisfaction.⁶⁴

As my participants narrated their life stories, the way they talked about their prior jobs made me think that work engagement was a better explanation for their long hours than workaholism. Still, it is hard to know for sure or to untangle their mix of motives. Even if I had administered the standard psychological scales, these results would have provided an unreliable retrospective account of how my participants felt a year or more earlier when they were working full time. After they were out of work, some rethought their priorities. That new perspective could prompt them to reframe what may have been a perfectly healthy dedication to a challenging job as an unhealthy obsession. Thus, I define a living-to-work ethic to include both workaholism and work engagement without having to choose one or the other.⁶⁵

For example, Elizabeth Montgomery, the successful high-end business furniture saleswoman, speculated that her work efforts stemmed from her difficult-to-please mother: “You could come home with straight As, and she didn’t think it was good enough.” Elizabeth was trying to accept that “you’re perfect in your own right” and “just be okay with who you are, what you’re doing and where you’re going.” Yet, when she gave her work history, she described how much she had enjoyed her jobs. For example, in one of her early jobs she was a buyer for a department store chain of forty stores, which gave her a lot of clout at trade shows: “So that was really, really fun.” She “had a blast” when she grew online sales by 500 percent in another job. (In chapter 6 I give an in-depth analysis of my participants’ accounts of the fun they had on their jobs.) That sounds like enthusiastic engagement rather than a compulsive addiction. Elizabeth had been a standout athlete in high school and college, and she used sports analogies to explain why she liked concrete ways of measuring achievement: “In the athletic part you set the goal. You go out and achieve it. If that means hiking to Mount Whitney, getting a trophy or that, okay. And so, I think that’s who I am.” Winning the trophy, literally or metaphorically, is pleasurable.

Similarly, Abel Jimenez said he had enjoyed his work when his produce market was doing well. In her interview with Abel, Claudia C. added some of her own wording to our standard question, “What is the meaning or importance of work for you?” She asked Abel instead, “There are people who live to work, because the only way they know to enjoy their lives is working. What does work mean to you?” Her wording illustrates the cultural standing of the idea that it is bad to “live to work.” Abel may have picked up on that cue because he replied, “At some point I was also dedicated exclusively to my work. The more you have, the more you want to have.” He went on to deliver the lines I quoted earlier about having gotten “too deep into work,” which kept him from spending time with his young children. Yet, as Abel kept talking, his story changed. He said he used to sleep in his truck because he was constantly on the go: “Why? Because one gets deep into business. Well, at least I did. Because the more you get into it, the more you enjoy it, and more business brings in more business, and so on.” He explained, “And so you get yourself deeper into work, and you feel fulfilled by work. And you like more and more the product of your work, what you get out of it, what you do, what you start achieving.” To me, it sounds as if Abel had been deeply and pleasurably engaged by his work.

It seems that those who hold a living-to-work ethic want to be high achievers and are willing to work long hours to attain their goals. The psychological and material rewards of achieving challenging goals make this ethic more understandable than Weber’s depiction of a joyless, nose-to-the-grindstone habit. What is missing from his description is that at least some of those who live to work take pleasure in doing so.⁶⁶

Job Search with a Living-to-Work Ethic

How do high achievers accustomed to devoting much of their time to their work approach a search for another position? Typically, they do not take the first job that comes along just to keep working. Elizabeth Montgomery’s drive for success makes her job search quite different from one colored by her blue-collar parents’ view that one job is as good as another, which I discuss in chapter 6 as the “work-is-work” approach to choosing a job or occupation. That difference came to a head after she had been out of work for many months, and her father said, “ ‘Just go get a job. Even if that’s McDonalds.’ ” Elizabeth was incredulous: “I’m like, ‘What?’ ” If someone cares about career success, it is not that all work has dignity: some jobs are worthwhile, and others are not. Thus, many of those who had lived to work ended up staying out of work longer than those who had invested less of their time and identities in their jobs. This was partly because those who had lived to work typically had greater financial resources (savings, severance payments); yet they were also selective about what job would be an appropriate next step in their career.⁶⁷ Instead of taking the first job that came along, some of those who had lived to work threw themselves into the challenge of finding another job that would fit their high goals.

And a challenge it was. In the United States, it was more than six years before the numbers of jobs returned to their levels just before the Great Recession, which hit southern California particularly hard.⁶⁸ However, US labor market practices also made the job search onerous.

Job hunting in the United States can be extremely time consuming at present. The minimum that job seekers need to do is stay up to date with postings on numerous websites, which can occupy several hours every day. Applying for those jobs is also done online, which can be a lengthy process, especially for someone who is not computer-savvy. Yet, learning about job openings and applying for them just scratch the surface of job search efforts.

First, job seekers need to decide what kind of work they want. Nearly everyone I interviewed wanted to find another job like the one they had before. Except for my participants in their twenties, very few were formulating their career goals from scratch. However, as the duration of their unemployment grew longer, some reconsidered their career goals. A handful obtained additional education or skills, although free retraining programs were in short supply.⁶⁹

Second, all aspects of one’s self-presentation must be carefully managed. Each application requires tinkering with the wording of your resume so that it includes the keywords that will highlight your suitability for the opening and will ensure it will pass through automatic filters. There are strategic choices to be made about the resume, such as whether it should be organized chronologically or functionally, whether to include testimonials, and how to hide embarrassing gaps between jobs. Although I heard varying opinions about whether employers read cover letters, some of my interviewees put a lot of time into crafting those as well.⁷⁰

Job seekers also must always be ready to promote themselves one on one, as I heard from Heather Wieshlow, a career counselor who spoke to a job club meeting organized by a county office of the California Employment Development Department. She asked the job seekers to refine their “thirty-second commercial” (a.k.a. the “elevator pitch,” because it is short enough to be delivered in an elevator ride). This two- to three-sentence job pitch is used to describe a job seeker’s work experience and goals to someone staffing a table at a job fair or to acquaintances who might be able to suggest someone they could talk to. She also suggested listing fifty accomplishments in a spreadsheet. Fifty was a bare minimum; she said her clients could come up with a hundred or more, once they thought about it. They did not all have to be work accomplishments, but all should be in the PAR format: What was the Problem, what Action did you take, and what was the Result? Results should be quantified if possible. After job seekers created a list of their accomplishments, they could turn them into effective “power stories” to share in a job interview.

The part of the job search that really consumed a lot of time was networking. Job seekers were told over and over that the only way to get an edge in the job search was to talk to people who might know about openings. Career counselors estimated that at least 70 percent of job seekers find a position through networking, because many of those positions were not advertised.⁷¹ To learn about unadvertised jobs, the diligent job seeker must constantly reach out to new people to ask if they know of any openings. Anyone could potentially have a lead, so one always must be ready to deliver a thirty-second commercial. Networking can be done in person or through social media. Social media connections, and all one’s other acquaintances, can be solicited for job leads or for names of someone else who might know of a job lead. In-person networking can take place through planned group networking events, professional meetings, everyday encounters, and informational interviews. One’s presence on professional websites can be boosted by increasing the number of one’s connections, obtaining endorsements, joining online groups, posting comments that get liked, and so on.⁷²

Doing volunteer work was also a popular job search strategy. Several of my interviewees worked as volunteers in the hopes that the agencies for which they volunteered might eventually have a paying job for them. Others took freelance jobs to continue using their skills, even if they were unpaid.

Career counselors also recommended that job seekers meet once a week with a small group or accountability partner to set goals and discuss their job search efforts. At the meetings of one accountability group I attended, members delivered progress reports each week and gave each other emotional support, as well as practical advice.

Some of my interviewees were skeptical about the value of the large networking events where you spent your time talking to other people who were out of work, but others attended them regularly. That strategy could be useful because even within networking groups for people in the same field—for example, for IT workers or for finance and accounting executives—attendees had different specialties, so they were not necessarily in competition. Probably of greater value, if they could afford the registration fees, were trade and professional association meetings where they could chat up employed colleagues in their field.

Elizabeth Montgomery went to many kinds of networking events. She had attended four in the week before we met for the first time. At these networking meetings, she gave other job seekers names of people they could talk to, and she hoped they would reciprocate. She liked talking to people, and networking fit with the skillset she had as a successful sales representative. Still, it was tiring to continue that outreach for the two-and-a-half years she had been out of work. She commented wearily, “I know something will happen. It’s just, it’s kind of like sales. We gotta throw so much up there, and something’ll land. But I’ll be honest, I did—how many events this week? Four. And I’m tired.” At each of these events, it was “like keeping your face and smiling.” She had also belonged to four accountability groups, although by the time we met, she was down to two.

Lisa Rose also put a lot of effort into her job search. She told me, “When you’ve been doing, doing, doing, doing, doing, my goodness, it’s hard to just come to a grinding halt. So, I was probably overly ambitious, but I got out and I met with, like, 110 people in the space of four months. So, every day I was meeting with usually two people, sometimes three.” Lisa preferred doing one-on-one informational interviews rather than networking in large groups. An informational interview is a prearranged meeting with someone working in one’s desired field. Its ostensible purpose is to learn more about the person’s work, but everyone knows that the hidden agenda is to impress someone who will keep you in mind for a job opening. When Lisa finally got a job, she sent me an email that cataloged her efforts during her twenty-nine-month job search. Here is her list, verbatim:

4,000+ emails

252 networking meetings
430 connections on LinkedIn (started at 0)
34 resumes
25 positions for which I was interviewed
4 times a finalist
3 temporary jobs

2 training/skills development programs

Job searches are not conducted this way everywhere. Ofer Sharone compared the process of looking for white-collar jobs in the San Francisco Bay area with the process in Tel Aviv, a high-tech hub in Israel. In Israel white-collar job seekers submit their credentials to staffing agencies rather than to employers. The agencies consider the applicant’s work experience, salary requirements, and interpersonal skills, as revealed by tests. The result is that Israeli job seekers worry about the screening tests and still must put the right buzzwords on their resume, but they only submit it once and do not spend their time on coffee dates with strangers who might know about a job opening. Nor do Israeli job seekers send cover letters when they apply for jobs or thank-you notes following an interview. When Sharone conducted his research in 2006, there were no networking events in Israel, and Israelis did not use online professional social networking sites like LinkedIn. Israelis did not understand why anyone would expect someone they barely knew to help them get a job.⁷³

How useful is this never-ending job search activity in the United States, especially the optional networking? One of Lisa Rose’s 252 networking meetings, an informational interview, eventually led to her new job. The same was true, however, for only one other participant in my study. Everyone else I interviewed eventually found work in conventional ways: through job websites, employment agencies, and tips from people who knew them, rather than by networking with strangers.

I was struck, however, by the psychic and social benefits of networking. Networking was an optional activity with no upper limit on the amount of work one could do. For some of those who had lived to work, like Lisa Rose and Elizabeth Montgomery, it may have been an opportunity to really kill it at the job search, just as they had on the job.

Attending networking events enables the job seeker to stay busy. Pepper Hill, a nonprofit administrator, described the social pressures to be busy all the time, mimicking a typical conversation with other professionals: “You know most people: ‘I’m busy, busy, busy.’ ‘How are you?’ ‘I’m busy, busy, busy, busy.’ People never say, ‘Gee, I got nothing going on this weekend.’ ”⁷⁴ Many of my participants wanted to stay busy. In addition to attending networking meetings, Elizabeth Montgomery had taken an MBA course while she was out of work, and she attended alumni events for the university. She explained why: “ ‘Cause I just can’t sit idle. So, I wanted to be doing stuff.” Some stayed busy with sports and exercise. Elizabeth completed long-distance bike rides; Pepper Hill took up water aerobics and even taught classes in it.

Notice, however, that a stay-busy ethic is not the same as a work ethic. That is evident in Pepper Hill’s mimicking the words of her professional peers, who “never say, ‘Gee, I got nothing going on this weekend.’ ” If it is shameful to have nothing planned for a weekend, then perhaps work is not what matters. What matters is constant activity.⁷⁵

Unemployment among Those with a Diligent 9-to-5 Work Ethic

Many of my participants distinguished living to work from a different kind of work ethic. This would sometimes happen when I asked whether they agreed with this statement: “Work is central to my identity.” Several responded by saying “no” or “not now,” but they would immediately add that when they had a job, they had been a conscientious worker:

CHARLIE MIKE ROMERO (unemployed database administrator): My work—no […] For me, it is my family. My work is important—I mean, I will do it, of course I will always deliver in the best possible manner, it is always my pride when I finish a job well done. I enjoy doing well what I know, but, still, it is not the center of my life. The center of my life is my family. And then comes my work.

NATALIE HARPER (unemployed grant professional): “Work is central to my identity.” I might have said that years ago. No, it’s just that—I mean, I do a good job. I’m professional.

JIM WADE (former worker in an auto parts store, among other jobs): I’m not a workaholic, but I do believe in hard work.

The quick additions of “I mean I do a good job”; “My work is important—I mean, I will do it, of course I will always deliver in the best possible manner, it is always my pride when I finish a job well done”; and “I do believe in hard work” suggest that these participants did not want me to draw the wrong conclusion when they said work was not central to their identity or they were not a workaholic. Even if their work was not their central concern or what they wanted to do all the time, they still were good workers. Being a conscientious worker has high cultural standing.⁷⁶

Yet, they also spoke as if the common view in their opinion community was that one should not go overboard and become a workaholic. Views that are perceived as representing the common opinion can be stated without qualification.⁷⁷ Jim Wade did not explain or defend his statement, “I’m not a workaholic.” Nor did Robert Milner when he stated, “Although I work to live, I don’t live to work.” He made that comment when I asked for his thoughts about the statement, “Work is central to my identity.” He said it was, but then he clarified his response so I would not get the wrong idea: “Yes, um … by saying—although I work to live, I don’t live to work.”⁷⁸ He reacted as though I might think less of him for agreeing that work was central to his identity. It was as if he had read Weber and did not want me to think he was one of those dull businessmen who was preoccupied with his work to the exclusion of all else. Robert’s and Jim’s wording implies that of course one should not be a workaholic or live to work.

Listening to these participants and others like them, I realized that there was a different kind of productivist work ethic, one that emphasizes pride in one’s work effort without making one’s job the center of one’s interests. This is what I call a diligent 9-to-5 work ethic.⁷⁹ (“9-to-5” should not be interpreted literally; the actual work hours could be different.) Four key characteristics of a diligent 9-to-5 work ethic are pride in the quality of one’s work; needing paid work to feel productive and worthwhile, hence drawing self-esteem from having a job and being a good worker; criticizing those who do not want to go to work; yet believing work time should be contained.

The first three features define a productivist outlook and are also typically held by those with a living-to-work ethic. It is the last feature—believing that work time should be contained—that differentiates the two groups: they differ in their working rhythms and boundaries. For those with a living-to-work ethic, the boundary between work time and nonwork time is porous. Achieving at a high level comes first, and everything else fits into whatever time is left or it is postponed or dropped. By contrast, those with a diligent 9-to-5 work ethic appreciate the rhythm of going to work, focusing on their job, and doing it well—and then leaving the workplace and immersing themselves in the rest of their life. They believe one should be a good worker on the job, but one’s job should not be all-consuming. In other words, there should be a division between work time, when one should be devoted to one’s job, and nonwork time; this separation is missing for those who live to work. Those with a diligent 9-to-5 work ethic had already erected boundaries between work and the rest of their life that some of my living-to-work participants only began to construct after they lost their jobs.

As I describe the features of a diligent 9-to-5 work ethic, it will become clear that the experience of being unemployed was different for those with this ethic than it was for those who said they had lived to work. Ironically, although those with a diligent 9-to-5 work ethic want boundaries on their work time, when they were unemployed they talked about missing the intangible benefits of work more than did those who had lived to work.

Work Pride and Diligence

At the beginning of this section, we heard from Natalie Harper and Charlie Mike Romero that, although work was not central to their identity, “It is always my pride when I finish a job well done,” as Charlie Mike put it. Similarly, Terrance West, who had held a variety of jobs, including working as a shipping-receiving clerk in warehouses and a convenience store clerk, spoke of taking pride in being a good worker: “I take my work very seriously, and I take a lot of pride in what I do.” Theresa Allen, who had worked as a waitress and in other jobs in the hospitality industry, was proud to recall, “I would work the Monday through Friday and always be there. […] I remember my boss, I worked at Embassy Suites for about seven years and my boss would say, ‘I’m okay. I have the A-Team.’ ” Emily Quinn remarked, “Nobody can take away my history as an executive assistant.” She added, “I was fabulous.”

Summer Carrington, who handled foreclosed properties for a big bank, and her sister Krystal Murphy, an administrative assistant at the bank, said they had learned the importance of being conscientious workers growing up, when they went into the office to help their mother, a medical chart clerk: “We learned, all of us, a good work ethic. […] Mom said, you know, ‘These are people’s lives. These are not just paper. You have to remember that. When you look at a chart, it doesn’t matter who they are, anything else. That information needs to be put in there because that’s their life.’ […] Working and doing the work correctly [is something] we learned at an early age.”

This pride in being a diligent worker was the first shift from traditionalism that Weber described: it stemmed from Luther’s preaching that workers should consider their worldly duties as a sacred calling. Weber spoke of employers’ frustration with traditionalistic workers who put little thought or energy into their jobs, and he pointed out that it served employers’ purpose for workers to believe they had a religious duty to work hard and well.

It would be a mistake, however, to view work pride as entailing quiet subservience. Summer Carrington had raised hard questions at company meetings and mocked one of her bosses to his face. Terrance West did not hesitate to speak up when he thought he was not being treated properly. Someone with a diligent 9-to-5 work ethic is motivated by pride in their work, not by loyalty to the organization and its management.⁸⁰ Workers who master their jobs may realize that they know operations at that level better than their bosses do. The very nature of the diligent 9-to-5 work ethic limits their commitment because workers only agree to be conscientious during their stipulated workday. Terrance was willing to go beyond that, to be called occasionally to answer questions in the middle of the night, but this work ethic only commands doing a good job during one’s contractual work hours.

Upholding a duty to be a conscientious, reliable, professional employee explains how my participants with this ethic worked. It does not explain why they worked and what many of my participants missed when they were unemployed.

Needing Paid Work to Feel Productive and Worthwhile

The eminent social psychologist of unemployment, Marie Jahoda, identified as a key intangible benefit of work that it links individuals to “goals and purposes that transcend their own.”⁸¹ We could ask why someone needs paid employment to work to achieve larger goals and purposes. Certainly, those who volunteer their time for a good cause can feel a sense of purpose and make a social contribution. Some participants realized this. Ichabod Jones, an unemployed human services program director, pointed out, “You could be productive doing something else that is not work.” However, most of my participants felt they needed paid work to contribute something of value.

My participants’ belief that paid work gives them a purpose, and a way to be useful, would often be expressed in response to one of my standard questions, “What would you say is the meaning or importance of work for you?”

GINGER THI (unemployed administrative assistant): It gives you meaning to life, I feel worthwhile. And it pays the bills.

JAGAT BODHI (unemployed telecommunications technician): It’s a purpose in life. To be able to work. And to contribute. And to be rewarded for your efforts.

EMILY QUINN (unemployed executive secretary): I miss being valuable.

Without a job, some saw little reason to get up in the morning. Terrance West stated that he hoped to “get back to the workforce and feel like I’m a productive citizen.” He hated feeling “lazy” and “kind of like a bum because I’m not working.” During his more than two years out of work, he told me, “There’s times where I don’t even feel like getting out of bed, because I’m like, ‘Well, if I get out of bed, what am I gonna do?’ ” Terrance had many other interests: a boyfriend, a dog, a close family, and a strong interest in politics. Yet, without a job and after months of fruitless job searches, he did not know what to do with his time.

As another participant, Ralph Edwards, put it, “We have to have a purpose in order to sustain life, to get up in the morning. So, the most important reason for work is purpose, and not the monetary one.” Ralph was an unpaid lay minister, and he found some purpose in that. However, most of my participants needed a regular, paying job to feel they had a purpose in life and were productive.

Applying Productivist Values to Others

Those who hold a productivist ideology are likely to criticize adults who do not work regularly. Terrance West applied his productivist values not only to himself but also to others. From his mature perspective as a forty-year-old, he criticized young people like his niece and nephew, who were unwilling to work hard for their goals. He said his nephew wants to be a rapper and pretends he had a hard life, which Terrance disputed. He recounted his attempt to set his nephew straight: “ ‘No, kid. Your mom had a hard life. She had to get up at the crack of dawn and take care of your black ass,’ you know? ‘You didn’t have no hard life. Your life is hard now because you didn’t put in work.’ ” Terrance held up his niece and nephew’s mother (his sister) as an exemplar of hard work: “I remember her car broke down and she couldn’t drive to work, so she went and bought a bike, and she was riding on her bike at 3:00 in the morning. Riding her bike through Rialto to go to work. She would ride it in the rain. Then someone stole her bike, and she was walking, but that’s how dedicated—that’s how strong her work ethic is. My mother’s work ethic is like that.” He added, “My work ethic is like that.” Terrance’s disparaging comments about young people’s poor work ethic were common among those in their forties, fifties, and sixties, regardless of their racial identity. I heard similar complaints from middle-aged whites and Latinos about younger family members’ or coworkers’ lack of diligence.

The topic of government social programs was particularly likely to evoke a productivist discourse. When I asked whether the government should guarantee food, housing, or health care to everyone whether they are working or not, Jake Taylor, a young veteran who returned from deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, said it depended on why they were not working. He did not currently have a job, so he could understand that someone might not be working even though they wanted to and that others are physically or mentally disabled. Yet, he shared, “People who are lazy, or lackadaisical, just don’t want to do anything with their freakin’ life or anything like that, I mean, I would make them work for it.” This attitude was common among my participants, and other research shows it is common among the US public.⁸² As I describe in chapter 4, my participants were grateful for the food stamps and other programs that helped them, and they thought those programs should be available for others who could not find work in a bad economy. They drew a moral line, however, between those who wanted to work and could not find a job, and those who were able to work but not willing to do so. The latter should not receive government support, in their view.

This productivist judgment of those who did not want to work could also be the basis of a class identity: we, the middle class or “working class,” are hardworking, unlike the idle poor and the idle rich. For example, Charlie Mike Romero, who had been a database administrator, sketched a pyramid in response to a request to draw an image of society and his place in it. He placed himself in the middle layer of the pyramid, which he labeled “working class.” He described his class as “all of us who work” and “make an effort,” unlike the “rich and famous” at the top and the “welfare recipients” at the bottom. In his view, a work effort also includes efforts to afford a college degree. He commented that the rich “can go to any university they choose” because they can easily afford the expense, unlike the working class who “work hard in order to be able to get an education.”

Yet, this conventional discourse about lazy people was a double-edged sword for the long-term unemployed. They could take pride in having been good workers in the past, but after going months without working, they were keenly aware that others might perceive them as loafers. About a year into my project, I attended a job club reunion. One of the attendees had helped run her family’s pharmacy, but after it closed, the only job she could get was as a part-time cashier at a chain drugstore where she earned less than she was receiving from unemployment benefits. She took the job anyway. Another attendee jokingly invoked a common stereotype of the unemployed: “You could be sitting on a couch, with your feet up, watching TV, and eating bonbons.” Everyone there understood that was far from the truth, but they suspected that it was what other people thought.

Jim Wade felt that stigma from some older members of his church who had been employed at a time when it was easier to find a job: “I’ve had problems with people thinking that I was unemployed, you know, because I don’t wanna work, I’m not trying to find work.” Some of those who had the living-to-work ethic shared their worries about this perception. In our interview, Stacie McCarthy referred to a Sixty Minutes segment on employers’ reluctance to hire the long-term unemployed. She wondered whether employers “think we’re lazy.” Pepper Hill commented, “I don’t think it’s bad to be unemployed, but we put a connotation to it as a negative, and unemployed is seeing someone sitting home just looking for jobs or doing nothing. And number one, as we know, most unemployed people aren’t doing that.”

Wanting Regular Work Hours

The culture theorist Lauren Berlant writes of the way post-Fordist uncertainty creates “aspirational normalcy”; that is, “the desire to feel normal, and to feel normalcy as a ground of dependable life, a life that does not have to keep being reinvented.” Going to work, she explains, is one way of constructing a dependable, normal life.⁸³ Less poetically, the social psychologist Marie Jahoda proposed that having a “time structure” is one of the intangible benefits of working.⁸⁴

As I have argued, that is an overgeneralization: those with a living-to-work ethic do not need dependable work patterns or a fixed time structure. After experiencing working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic, many may find that a fixed time structure is less important. Still, most of my participants with a diligent 9-to-5 work ethic in the pre-pandemic period missed their regular working hours—leaving home in the morning and returning at night—and the sense of normalcy that this routine had provided.

Fixed work hours are not universal; some argue they are a malign invention. In Lucien Febvre’s evocative terms, industrial capitalism brought about a shift from lived time (le temps vécu) to measured time (le temps mesuré).⁸⁵ In an influential article, the historian E. P. Thompson wrote about the shift from the irregular schedules that are common in pastoral and agricultural societies—where work rhythms depended on requirements of the task, the season, and the hours of sunlight—to industrial time set by clocks. He saw chaining work to the clock as contributing to the rigid Puritan attitude about wasting time described by Weber. Thompson appreciated the earlier task orientation because it required the “least demarcation between ‘work’ and ‘life.’ Social intercourse and labour are intermingled—the working-day lengthens or contracts according the task.”⁸⁶ At the end of his article, he called for a return to the earlier rhythms: “Men might have to re-learn some of the arts of living lost in the industrial revolution: how to fill the interstices of their days with enriched, more leisurely, personal and social relations; how to break down once more the barriers between work and life.”⁸⁷

Yet, as Thompson realized, “No culture re-appears in the same form.”⁸⁸ He wrote this article in the late 1960s as leisure time was increasing, but that trend has since reversed. Thompson wanted to let some personal time back into working hours instead of maintaining their separation, but the reverse has been happening: work is infiltrating personal time, especially for white-collar workers.⁸⁹ It matters whether breaching barriers between work and the rest of life will give workers more personal time and greater flexibility, or less personal time and thus fewer options about how to spend their time.

Many of my unemployed participants in the early 2010s aspired to return to regular, dependable daily and weekly rhythms of work time alternating with time outside work. They did not want unending free time during their weekdays while they were unemployed, nor did they want their jobs to spill over into their evenings and weekends once they were working again. They also preferred a spatial division, with work and the rest of their life occurring in different locations.

Several participants spoke about missing the routine of getting up and going to work:

DELLA JONES (unemployed teacher): Since I don’t have a job, I kind of don’t know what I’m doing. It’s not that you just don’t have any money. It’s also you get up and you’re not going to work. You miss that whole thing.

AMBER WASHINGTON (unemployed social service agency administrator): I need structure. I need something to get up and go to every day and know I’m gonna be there […] 9:00 to 5:30 or 9:00 to 6:00 every day.

MICKEY MULLER (unemployed engineer): Work would get me up in the morning, go someplace, have relationships with my coworkers.

MARY BROWN (unemployed student adviser): I’ve always worked. So, you know, it’s kind of weird not getting up and going to work every day.

TERRANCE WEST (unemployed shipping-receiving clerk): I hate the not having somewhere to be every day and the being on a set schedule.

Defined work times also create a distinction between idleness and leisure. For those with a diligent 9-to-5 work ethic, leisure is enjoyable when it contrasts with and refreshes one from work. Idleness during normal working hours is something else entirely. Day and night, weekdays and weekends, flow together without distinction. Terrance West said, “Sure, I like to sleep in from time to time, but not all the time. Yeah, sure, I like to watch TV, but I don’t want to watch it all the time.” My participants appreciated that being out of work gave them more personal time than their previous overfull work schedules had allowed, but they did not need or want as much free time as they had.

Some spoke of work as necessary for their health and well-being. Summer Carrington and Krystal Murphy attributed their father’s untimely death in his late fifties to the closing of the Kaiser steel mill where he had worked, leaving him nothing to do but hang around the house and clean his guns. Hillary Edwards, who had been a banker, said, “Work is a stress buster.” She explained, “You can sit at home and be depressed, but if you go out to work and around other people, you don’t have that problem.” When I asked Miguel Vargas, an unemployed business operations manager, what he thought about the statement, “Work is central to my identity,” he replied that he did not work for his identity: he worked “to be healthy. If you’re working, your body will still continue to work.” Not going to work, he said, was like leaving a car on the street to rust. In that sense, regular work can be a form of self-care, if it is properly bounded.⁹⁰

Boundaries are important for those with a diligent 9-to-5 work ethic. In their view, work time should not intrude on nonwork time. Celeste Rue, an administrative assistant, was clear about this. She recounted telling a coworker in a recent job, “I said, ‘I love doing this.’ I said, ‘But once I walk out the door at five o’clock, my day begins. I can’t wait to get to work, and then when I’m at work, I can’t wait to get home to family stuff.’ ” Miriam Ramos loved being a hairdresser, but time away from work was equally important to her. She recounted being incredulous when another hairdresser said the salon owner was forcing her to work six days a week. Miriam said to her, “ ‘Well, the whole point of working is not just to work. It’s to have a balanced life so you feel good about your work and what you’re doing.’ ” Jorge Paiz, a construction worker, corrected his wife’s translation when he talked about his ideal job. Initially she thought he had said, “It doesn’t matter if you have to work extra hours or hard work.” He explained that, no, he was happy to do hard work, but he did not want to work extra hours.

Ichabod Jones is an interesting example because he had the opportunity to pursue higher-level jobs but chose not to do so to preserve his free time. After he received his master’s degree in public health, he held program director positions in human services for nearly thirty years. He was not interested in moving up to an executive director position because “I want to be able to go home at five o’clock. I don’t like the thought that I’ve got to meet with this group, I’ve got to meet with that group, the board, the foundation.” He acknowledged that anyone looking at his resume would say, “ ‘Well, Ichabod, that’s a natural progression.’ ” His response was, “I know the bus is going there, but I want to get off the bus sooner.” When I asked the salary he would be satisfied with in the future, he said he would be satisfied with a large pay cut from the $80,000 a year he had earned before, if it were a secure job that would give him “peace of mind.”

Wanting to Belong

Taking part in those rhythms of going to work and coming home is a way not only of structuring one’s time but also of forming human connections and being part of mainstream society.⁹¹

Emily Quinn, a former executive secretary, said that work meant for her a sense of “belonging.” Without a job, she felt left out. She depicted this feeling when I asked her to draw a picture of society and her place in it. Emily drew a fence, on one side of which were people laughing, talking, and going together into and out of a workplace and a restaurant. She was on the other side of the fence, alone (figure 2.1). The weekly job club meetings and accountability/support group meetings she had attended were not a substitute for going to work every day.

Stick figure (“me”) next to a high fence. On the other side are stick figures moving among buildings labeled Company, Lunch Restaurant, and Bank, along with the words, “People working, living, earning, laughing, talking, contributing.” — FIGURE 2.1. Emily Quinn’s drawing in response to the question, “How do you see society and your place in it?”

Part of what Emily missed was socializing with coworkers. In chapter 6, I discuss how socializing with coworkers contributed to making a job “fun.” However, the feeling of belonging goes beyond socializing. For those with this productivist work ethic, what matters is a broader sense of having a place in society.

Two people spoke of being jobless as akin to being homeless. Natalie Harper, the grant professional I quoted earlier as saying her work was not central to her identity, still said she felt “marginalized” by being out of work. While she was unemployed, she felt, “I’m not in the mainstream of America.” She said she would think of that when she saw people wearing work badges: “I see people walking around […] with little ID badges. Maybe work isn’t my identity, but having that badge distinguishes somebody in a traditional way. It’s like having a house key means you have a door to unlock. Homeless people don’t have to have a key.”

Ann Lopez, an unemployed IT worker, also used the metaphor of being homeless and feeling “misplaced.” This came to a head when she tried to keep busy while she was out of work by helping her sister, only to displease her. Ann said, “I really wanted to cry and get depressed ‘cause I felt misplaced.” Searching for words to explain her feeling of being “misplaced,” she said, “Like a homeless [person], because you’re jobless, basically. You don’t have a home to go to every day. You don’t have a routine.” For Ann, a “routine” is more than a structure for her time. It also provides a place to go and belong.

My participants’ desires to belong, to be healthy, and to return to the routines of going to work were not morally loaded the way that their values of being productive and conscientious were. They spoke of what they needed and wanted, not only of what they ought to do.⁹²

It is significant, however, that what my participants enjoyed was work that was organized in a certain way—with regular hours that were not onerous and at a shared workplace where they could socialize with others. All of that changed for the 42 percent of Americans who worked from home during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.⁹³ Suddenly, many had more flexible working hours, with greater opportunities to take care of personal or family needs during the hours they had previously been expected to be at the office focused on their job. Those who used to spend an hour or more commuting between their home and their office gained precious time to use to meet their own needs and those of their family. On the downside, however, some had to work longer hours during the pandemic, and many parents found trying to combine childcare with their work unbearably stressful. Workers under the age of fifty reported having difficulty being motivated to do their jobs remotely.⁹⁴ Earlier research found that, after an initial honeymoon period, those who work from home full time miss human contact.⁹⁵ If working from home were to become the dominant way of organizing work in the future, a normal life would no longer be defined by a fixed workday or by leaving home and then returning to it. The new normal could have its own pleasures, but they would be different.

The Diligent 9-to-5 Job Search: Re-Creating a Normal Workday

Earlier I described the psychic benefits of the elaborate, time-consuming rituals of contemporary job hunting in the United States for those who had held a living-to-work ethic. For those with a diligent 9-to-5 work ethic, the career counseling, job club, networking, and accountability group meetings also yielded psychic and social benefits.

For one thing, going to these meetings enabled them to defend against any perception that they were just kicking back and enjoying their free time. My interviewees rebutted suspicions that they were loafing by reciting their job search efforts: “I’m up there, Employment Resource Center, on a regular basis. I’m checking, using all the methods of job search” (Jim Wade); “I’m doing what I can. I check my websites every day [and] I’m going to the networking [meetings]” (Daniel Horn). Mona Childs’s conscience was clear: “I really have to ask myself truthfully, were you dedicated in using your time wisely and looking for work, in networking, and doing as much as you can? And I do. People that know me have told me, ‘Mona, let’s just put it this way. We can’t fault you for trying. You try harder than anyone we know.’ I do try really hard.”

Like other researchers, I often heard the refrain that finding another job was a job in itself, which it certainly could be.⁹⁶ Robert Milner said, “I’ve been telling people we probably work harder at trying to find a job than most people do that are already working.” Linda McDaniel made the same point: “My full-time job right now is finding new employment, and so, every Monday morning [attending the Employment Development Department job club], that’s my way of reminding myself and goal setting for what I want to accomplish that week. Who do I want to talk to? What do I want to change on my resume? What interview skills can I gain? How do I need to tweak my thirty-second commercial?”

Not all unemployed people fill up their time with job search activities. My sample was biased toward those who did, because I met many of my participants at career counseling sessions, job clubs, and accountability group meetings. By contrast, those I met because they were referred to me by friends included a discouraged worker who may also have been suffering from depression and spent his days watching television; someone who was physically disabled; and a woman who had quit full-time work many years before we met and only returned to the job market when her husband lost his job. These people did not feel the need to stay so busy. However, they were the exceptions among my participants.

Like those with a living-to-work ethic, those with a diligent 9-to-5 work ethic found ways to stay busy in addition to attending those meetings, such as by doing volunteer work and taking occasional freelance jobs. However, those who had lived to work and those with the diligent 9-to-5 work ethic stayed busy in different ways. At least some of the former, like Lisa Rose and Elizabeth Montgomery, went all out on the optional aspects of the job search like networking, trying to stay almost as busy as they had been when they were working. By contrast, for many of those with a diligent 9-to-5 work ethic, one goal (in addition to finding another job) seemed to be to re-create the routines of a normal workday. The job search rituals were a form of what Michael Flaherty calls “time work”: “ways in which people attempt to control or customize their own experience of time.”⁹⁷

That was clear in the way Robert Milner responded when I asked about his daily routine while he was unemployed. He said he got up early, checked his email, and took a walk before he left the house at 8:00 or 9:00 A.M. Then he went to Starbucks, which he used as his office. There he would look at job openings online and go through his social media to see whom he could contact for leads. He belonged to two accountability groups, each of which met weekly. (“I’ll go there, spend some time, just to talk to people who are in the same situation as I’m in. Try to help each other. Try to set some goals.”) He had two friends in business whom he helped without pay so he could keep his skills up to date, and sometimes he did research in the town library. He returned home around 4:00 P.M. and then would work out in the community center’s fitness room. In this way he managed a semblance of a normal working day.⁹⁸ Going out to Starbucks was an important part of that: “It’s just a great way to be amongst people who are kind of doing the same thing.” Also, it helped him and his wife, a full-time homemaker, maintain their separate realms: “My wife is at home. That’s her space. That’s her time.”

Note that exercise was also part of Robert Milner’s daily routine: a walk to start the day and a workout at the community center to end it. Exercise was a regular part of many of my interviewees’ daily routines. Few could afford a gym membership, but they could take advantage of the warm southern California climate by biking, walking, and running outdoors. When he was not looking for work or taking odd jobs, Daniel Horn, a former contractor, would run for three miles every other day and was up to 190 pushups, which he explained by saying, “I can’t just sit around.”⁹⁹

Regular exercise, of course, contributes to both physical health and mental health because it relieves stress. It also is a way of staying busy, of structuring time and filling it. As Ann Lopez said, “People think I don’t do nothing. But, you know, hey, I do things. I keep myself busy.” However, those with a diligent 9-to-5 work ethic did not describe social pressures to be “busy, busy, busy”—the unending busyness of those who live to work. Instead, the social pressure they faced was to do something productive during conventional working hours.

Thus, Americans’ time work is not limited to work time. As I explained, a busyness ethos is not necessarily a work ethic; for example, exercise is one of many ways of staying busy. Nor does a stay-busy ethos require living to work, although these have been equated. For example, a guide for international visitors to the United States links Americans’ valuation of staying active to workaholism and identifying with one’s occupation:

People think that it is “sinful” to “waste one’s time,” to sit around doing nothing or just to “daydream.” Such a “no nonsense” attitude toward life has created many people who have come to be known as “workaholics,” or people who are addicted to their work, who think constantly about their jobs and who are frustrated if they are kept away from them, even during their evening hours and weekends. The workaholic syndrome, in turn, causes Americans to identify themselves wholly with their professions.¹⁰⁰

This cultural stereotype ignores the legions of diligent 9-to-5 workers who like to stay busy but who reject workaholism.

The Two Productivist Work Ethics Now

The two groups I have described here, those with a living-to-work ethic and those with a diligent 9-to-5 work ethic, share some productivist values and beliefs. Members of both groups take pride in the quality of their work and judge themselves and others by their work effort. However, these believers in hard work found these same productivist values were turned against them when others judged that their long-term unemployment indicated a deficient work ethic. Putting considerable time into their job search was one way to defend against those negative judgments and to stay busy—another value they shared.

However, it is also important to recognize the differences between a diligent 9-to-5 work ethic and a living-to-work ethic. Those with a diligent 9-to-5 work ethic want fixed working hours that leave them time for other things, whereas those with a living-to-work ethic are willing to work as long as necessary to reach their goals. With the forced interruption of unemployment, several of those who had lived to work began to question their former values. Nevertheless, some of those same people put long hours into their job search, even beyond the considerable effort expended by those with a diligent 9-to-5 work ethic, for whom it was more important to replicate a regular workday while they searched for another job.

Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism turned a spotlight on those who live to work. However, I suspect from my interviews in this project, my earlier research, studies of workers who “pass” as working longer hours than they do, and surveys of Americans’ working hours that workers with a diligent 9-to-5 work ethic are more numerous in the United States than those who willingly devote all their time and attention to their job.¹⁰¹

These two productivist work ethics may not be fixed orientations. Some of my participants’ ways of structuring their time changed, usually going from a living-to-work ethic to a 9-to-5 work ethic. When I asked Natalie Harper, an unemployed grant professional in her early sixties, whether work was central to her identity, she replied, “I might have said that years ago.” Stacie McCarthy, the loan processor who used to bring work home even though that was not expected in her position, stopped doing that in her new job. It is possible that younger workers might change in the other direction, perhaps taking on a living-to-work work ethic if they found work that inspired them to set aside everything else.

It is also possible for social and cultural values to change. One analysis of Americans’ holiday letters found a dramatic increase in references to the writer’s hectic schedule since the 1960s.¹⁰² Perhaps this “conspicuous consumption of time” will lessen. Some observers hope that the COVID-19 pandemic, which disrupted so many social habits, will lead to a greater appreciation of leisure and relaxation instead of being “crazy busy.”¹⁰³

Some of my participants were not especially motivated by either work ethic described in this chapter. Rather than being shaped by productivist attitudes, their work choices were driven primarily by consumption desires (working to live well), by the desire to be financially self-sufficient and care for their families (working to live), or by their gender identities and intimate relationships. In addition, work motivations and experiences are shaped by specific occupations and workplaces. I discuss these alternative ways of thinking about work and the problems they created for those out of work in the next several chapters, beginning with working to live well.

3. Working to Live Well

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Notes