CHAPTER 1 Multiple Meanings of Work in the United States

Portraits of Five Unemployed Americans

My arguments in this book rest on interviews with sixty-four unemployed southern Californians. Here are five of them. Their stories illustrate the diversity of Americans’ lives and work meanings.

Cultural Meanings Matter

It is easy to find theories of work meanings that ignore cultural differences and changes over time. One place to look for such theories is in speculative commentary about what life would be like were AI and automation to displace much of human labor. Some writers imagine that a mostly work-free future would be a paradise; others depict it as hellish.⁵ Although the predictions are starkly different, they rely on presumed universal meanings of working.

The utopian visions postulate a future in which the necessities of life are inexpensive and can be obtained with the assistance of a universal basic income, leaving people free to spend most of their time doing whatever they want to do instead of being forced to earn a living. People could devote more of their time to caring for others, lifelong learning, politics, or pleasurable pursuits. Post-work theorists Stanley Aronowitz and William DiFazio claim, “When they are given the opportunity, workers—skilled and unskilled alike—are pleased to be relieved of participation in the labor process provided they are guaranteed an income adequate to the current ‘decent’ standard of living.”⁶ As the sociologist Peter Frase puts it succinctly, “Wage labor sucks, and a lot of people will only do it if the alternative is destitution.”⁷

By contrast, another group of theorists view a future in which most adults do not work for a living as a dystopia of stunted lives shorn of material comforts, purpose, and dignity. For example, in The Second Machine Age, management theorists Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee are awed by the productive potential of new digital technologies but worry about the consequences for workers displaced by machines; they believe people do not want to be liberated from working. Brynjolfsson and McAfee write, “It’s tremendously important for people to work not just because that’s how they get their money, but also because it’s one of the principal ways they get many other important things: self-worth, community, engagement, healthy values, structure, and dignity, to name just a few.” Based on a cross-national Gallup survey, they conclude, “It seems that all around the world, people want to escape the evils of boredom, vice, and need and instead find mastery, autonomy, and purpose by working.”⁸

The dystopian theorists draw on important research by the social psychologist Marie Jahoda, who argues that humans need paid work in their lives. Jahoda was the lead author of a classic ethnographic analysis of unemployment, Marienthal, a study of the consequences of shuttering a factory that had been the main employer in a small Austrian town in the 1930s. Drawing on such research from the Depression, as well as studies of the effects of unemployment during the deep US recession of the early 1980s, Jahoda argues that unemployment deprives adults in modern society not only of money but also of psychologically important immaterial benefits: “time structure, social contacts, the experience of social purposes, status and identity, and regular activity.”⁹

Utopian images of a creative, leisurely post-work future are diametrically opposed to the dystopian images of boredom and vice. Yet, both assume that work means the same thing for all humans. Based on their assumptions about either the inessential or essential place of waged work in a good life, theorists from these opposing camps arrive at confident predictions about how all (or, at least, most) people everywhere would react to a work-less future. Both approaches fail to consider that, in this imagined society of the future, there will probably arise new ways of living and thinking about a good life. The result will be new subjective meanings of working and not working, ones that differ from subjectivities formed under industrial capitalism in the global North.

The very idea of unemployment is new in human history. As the historian John Garraty points out, unemployment was not considered a social problem until the late nineteenth century. In his words, unemployment is a disease of capitalism because it depends on an economic system in which most people sell their labor to an employer to sustain a living.¹⁰ Only people who enter into an ongoing contract to work for someone else can become unemployed. In societies that depend primarily on foraging and hunting, hunters do not think of themselves as unemployed when they rest between hunting expeditions.¹¹ Farmers working on their own land or peasants bound to a lord can harvest too little to survive, but their problem is not a lack of employment. Nor would a self-employed artist, craftsperson, shopkeeper, or other business owner ever be considered unemployed, even if their business was unprofitable. As Garraty puts it, “Only those who work for wages or a salary, who are at liberty to quit their jobs yet who may also be deprived of them by someone else, can become unemployed.”¹² Thus, unemployment is only conceivable in societies in which most people work for wages.¹³

Employment in a formal economy of regulated, continuing jobs is not the global norm; at present, 61 percent of the global population works in the informal economy.¹⁴ Given current digital information and communication technologies that enable new forms of self-employment and hybrid forms of employment—for example, independent contractors who work for others, such as ride-hail drivers—unemployment could cease to be a meaningful social construct in the future, as I explain in chapter 7.

Work has not always been considered necessary for dignity and purpose. In the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville traveled from France to the United States to study Americans’ values and institutions, which he expected would spread to Europe with the rise of democratic institutions. Among many other observations, he was struck by the fact that because there was relatively little hereditary wealth in the United States, it was common for men of all classes to work: “Everything therefore prompts the assumption that to work is the necessary, natural, and honest condition of all men. Not only is no dishonor associated with work, but among such peoples it is regarded as positively honorable.”¹⁵ Notice Tocqueville’s surprise about the high value placed on work. Coming from the aristocracy, he did not assume that working is a necessary source of self-esteem and dignity for all people. Instead, the social respect accorded to working for pay struck him as a curious new development. He commented that some rich Americans moved to Europe because “there they find the relics of aristocratic societies in which leisure is still honorable.”¹⁶ As Tocqueville clarifies, among the European aristocracy, work can be honorable but only “when inspired by ambition or pure virtue.” What was dishonorable was working just to earn money, and that too was a contrast with the attitudes he observed in the United States in the 1830s, where making money seemed to be the point of all work.

When Tocqueville writes, “Work is the necessary, natural, and honest condition of all men” in America, he may have meant “men” to be gender inclusive; more likely, he was not thinking about women, given the gender roles in the United States at that time. Adult women are not always and everywhere expected to engage in waged work, so how can work meanings be universal?

Subjective meanings of not working also depend on social expectations about when one’s working years begin and end. In some societies and in some economic classes, preadolescents are expected to help contribute to the family’s income, and by their late teens and early twenties young adults are expected to be self-supporting; in other societies and classes, working years typically begin later. There is also variation around the world regarding the end of the working years; that is, the age when adults are allowed, expected, or legally required to stop waged work. Thus, cultural conceptions of the life course and mandatory retirement age laws or job stipulations affect meanings of not working, as do accepted nonmarket ways of sustaining a living through assistance from kin, local communities, and the state.¹⁷

In sum, the meanings of working and not working could never be the same for all humans throughout time.

Multiple Cultural Meanings of Work

Some commentators do take culture into account when they contemplate the prospect of a possible future in which adults would not spend most of their time at paid work. They argue that a future without steady work would be especially difficult for US Americans because hard work is venerated in this society. In a thoughtful examination of the cultural effects of automation’s predicted displacement of large numbers of American workers, the journalist Derek Thompson writes, “The transition from labor force to leisure force would likely be particularly hard on Americans, the worker bees of the rich world.” He notes, “Richer, college-educated Americans are working more than they did 30 years ago, particularly when you count time working and answering e-mail at home.” He states, however, that this dedication to work is not new: “Industriousness has served as America’s unofficial religion since its founding. The sanctity and preeminence of work lie at the heart of the country’s politics, economics, and social interactions.”¹⁸

Observations about Americans’ devotion to work have been offered for nearly two centuries, as we saw in Tocqueville’s surprise that among the Americans he observed in the 1830s, work for pay “is regarded as positively honorable” and is not limited to those who are forced to work by economic necessity.¹⁹ Political philosopher Judith Shklar argues that in the United States paid employment is necessary for full social standing and inclusion. She writes, “The dignity of work and of personal achievement, and the contempt for aristocratic idleness, have since Colonial times been an important part of American civic self-identification.”²⁰ A 1980s guide for international visitors to the United States explains that Americans are “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.”²¹ Recent cultural descriptions echo these themes.²²

These standard descriptions of American cultural meanings of work are voiced by ordinary Americans as well. We saw that in Robert Milner’s comment: “Here, we’re so go, go, go. We’re chasing that almighty dollar.” In an online comment on a news article about skimpier economic protections for workers in the United States compared to other wealthy countries, someone wrote, “In the US, I think we believe life is for working hard. We are always trying to make that extra dollar thinking it will buy happiness. I’m not sure it will ever change in the US. The Protestant work ethic is part of our cultural DNA.”²³

I explain the problem with speaking of “our cultural DNA” shortly. At this point, notice that these commentators are all saying that Americans work hard, but they give different reasons for it.

One motivator for long work hours could be the desire to afford a better standard of living. That seems to be what the commentator meant by this statement: “We are always trying to make that extra dollar thinking it will buy happiness.” Working hard for the sake of “buying happiness” is also what Robert Milner meant when he said of Americans like him, “We’re chasing that almighty dollar.” However, that is just one reason why Americans could be driven to work hard.

Another motivator for hard work can be the desire to be self-supporting. Americans are often called “rugged individualists” because adults try to avoid financial dependence on other people or the state. Those who work low-wage jobs may need to work long hours out of necessity if they want to be self-supporting.

Sanctifying paid employment, and making it a prerequisite for full social standing, means that one has a social duty to be a waged worker; yet one can value holding a job and being a conscientious worker without wanting to work all the time. Robert Milner said he worked hard while at his job, but he did not like working long hours: “Although I work to live, I don’t live to work.” Furthermore, not everyone has the kind of job in which work can be completed on evenings and weekends; there would have been no way for Terrance West to bring home his warehouse or convenience store work, even if he had wanted to do so. He could answer occasional phone calls at night, but most of his tasks required his onsite presence.

Finally, there are those “who think constantly about their jobs and who are frustrated if they are kept away from them, even during their evening hours and weekends.” They willingly work long hours because their work is central to their identity and interests. These people certainly exist—they were among the participants in my study—but they are only a portion of US workers, not the majority. However, this unusual minority who lives to work may be more visible to commentators than the quiet majority of those who are conscientious but not obsessive about their jobs. Furthermore, only some of those who live to work are “workaholics” in the clinical sense. As I explain in the next chapter, “workaholism” has a technical meaning of work addiction driven by feelings of anxiety or guilt, and it differs from fulfilling work engagement.²⁴

One of my key points in this book is that when people speak of Americans’ work ethic—that is, their willingness to work hard—they can mean four things: (1) working hard to be self-supporting—which I call working to live; (2) working hard to afford a comfortable or affluent standard of living—which I term working to live well; (3) willingly working long hours because work is central to one’s identity and interests—which I call a living-to-work ethic; and (4) being a conscientious worker during regular work hours—which I term a diligent 9-to-5 work ethic (figure 1.1).²⁵

With the first and second work motivations—working to live and working to live well—the primary goal of working is to earn money. Working hard to support oneself, or to live well, is not what Max Weber meant when he wrote about the “Protestant Work Ethic.”²⁶ For Weber, the Protestant work ethic made work a moral duty, hence an end in itself. (To avoid any connotation that it applies to Protestants only, I prefer the term “productivist work ethic.”) Weber’s important insight was that work valued for its own sake is not the same as work valued for the sake of the income it brings. However, as I explain in chapter 2, Weber never clearly differentiated two forms of a productivist ethic: a moral duty to be a conscientious worker during one’s assigned work hours (a diligent 9-to-5 work ethic) and the restless urge to keep working all the time (a living-to-work ethic). Only the latter should be termed a Puritan work ethic. These distinctions matter because they lead to different ways of working, different ways of balancing waged work and the rest of life, and different feelings and behaviors when one is unemployed.

These work motivations are not mutually exclusive: many of my participants were motivated by more than one of them. For example, ReNé McKnight walked two miles to her job as a home health aide and two miles home to support herself and her daughter (working to live), and she threw herself into business ventures that would make her prosperous (working to live well). She valued doing her job well (both productivist work ethics), and she thought up new business ideas because she was a high achiever and because staying busy all the time helped her deal with her mental health struggles (a living-to-work ethic).

ReNé was also driven by a sense that there was a certain kind of work she was meant to do: helping others who were mentally ill or had experienced trauma. She had a passion for that field of work; for her, it was a calling in the original religious sense. She was not only dedicated to working generally but was also driven to perform a particular kind of work—which is not covered by any of the work ethics I listed, for reasons that are interesting to explore.

The “work ethic” construct is not about a passion for a particular occupation or simple enjoyment of one’s job, for two reasons. First, a “work ethic” connotes devotion to labor in an abstract sense—that is, devotion to paid labor in general—rather than engagement with a specific job. Second, having “a good work ethic” suggests having the fortitude to do something that is intrinsically unpleasant. However, not all work is unpleasant. Some jobs, like Robert Milner’s, are stimulating; some offer the satisfaction of being needed by one’s employers, contributing to a team, and being recognized for one’s contributions, as Terrance West and Katarina Spelling experienced; some are fun because they include enjoyable social interactions with coworkers, as Katarina also found. Most have both enjoyable and unpleasant aspects. It is meaningless to ask whether “work sucks” or instead is a source of “mastery, autonomy, or purpose.” Some jobs are the pits, and people are happier unemployed, at least for a while, than having to do those jobs every day. Other jobs are enjoyable or even deeply meaningful, and losing such work is a blow. Terrance was heartbroken when the job he loved so much at the sweet snack company ended; he spoke of it like a jilted lover. He did not feel the same way about the jobs where he was harassed. Yet, too often commentators talk about a “work ethic” as a character trait separate from people’s feelings about the specific work they are doing.

Most of this book is devoted to describing these differing ways my participants thought about their work and how each cultural model affected their experience of being unemployed. Chapter 2 discusses the two Protestant (productivist) work ethics; chapter 3, working to live well; chapter 4, working to live; and chapter 6, work motivations related to specific occupations and jobs. As I will explain, these different ways of thinking about work also provide distinctive ways of constructing a class identity. Is one’s class defined by being a productive worker, rather than someone who is idle? Or by one’s level of consumption or by being able to pay for one’s living expenses and be financially self-reliant? Or is it defined by the kind of tasks required in one’s job?²⁷

Describing Cultural Meanings

Cultural anthropologists have long recognized that folk cultural descriptions, the ones that circulate as popular national self-understandings, are subject to distortions. There is a cultural politics of representation: only some commentators are recognized as having the expertise to offer up cultural pronouncements, and those representations often serve political purposes. Contemporary cultural anthropologists have criticized essentializing descriptions and their baleful political effects, although their criticism is usually focused on homogenizing, static descriptions of non-Western societies.²⁸ However, essentializing descriptions of the United States are just as problematic.

For example, a 2018 White House Council of Economic Advisors report begins, “The American work ethic, the motivation that drives Americans to work longer hours each week and more weeks each year than any of our economic peers, is a long-standing contributor to America’s success.”²⁹ This rhetorical invocation of “the American work ethic” served a specific purpose in the report—to support stricter work requirements and so diminish reliance on government-funded health insurance, food stamps, and subsidized housing. True Americans, it seems, work long hours; everyone else has no desire to work, leaving out the vast middle ground of all those who do want to work but not to the exclusion of everything else they care about.³⁰

Contemporary cultural anthropologists question the generalizations implied in a phrase like “the American work ethic,” and they definitively reject the assumptions underlying the statement that any value is part of a “cultural DNA.” That biological analogy assumes that a culture is a singular entity, a bounded organism that reproduces itself over time. That is not how we anthropologists currently think about culture. “Culture” is not a singular thing, nor should we imagine it like a vapor suspended over a nation or social group. Instead, it is a gloss for a messy collection of things, from the “Sunday best” values trotted out for special occasions to unexamined everyday assumptions that may be quite different. I use “culture” as shorthand for referring to public artifacts, discourses, and shared practices, along with people’s learned understandings, which are the basis for constructing those public elements and are in turn constructed by them. It follows that this bundle of different things we call culture cannot have boundaries. Nation-states have defined borders, but the various things that constitute culture are not bound by international treaties. Artifacts, practices, and discourses spread across political borders and have differing meanings for various social groups within them.³¹ Some artifacts, practices, discourses, and understandings are long-standing and mutually reinforcing; others clash and change over time.³² Someone living in the United States may hear speeches extolling the dignity of work, positive or negative comments by relatives and friends about their jobs, thought leaders urging high ambitions and thought leaders who promote inner peace, dramas that glorify heroic exciting jobs and sitcoms set in dysfunctional offices. If we are to describe cultural meanings of work in the United States, we must include them all.

My concern about essentializing cultural descriptions is amplified by the theories and methods I follow as a psychological anthropologist. Psychological anthropologists examine the subjective meanings of shared discourses and institutions. Our approach is person-centered, meaning that we begin with how particular people think, feel, remember, experience, and act.³³ Thus, for the most part, my primary sources are not books, speeches, movies, or television shows, even though studies of public culture are invaluable and I include some examples of sources that mattered to my participants. The sources that mattered to them were usually ones I would never have thought to examine.

Yet, if one examines only the public side of culture, it is easy to make assumptions about the meanings they impart. Not all cultural anthropologists would agree about this, but I have argued that meanings do not reside in public discourses, artifacts, and practices. Instead, those things are endowed with meanings by persons whose interpretations are socially learned but selectively filtered and colored by their personal histories and values.³⁴ Thus, I speak of “Americans’ cultural meanings” rather than “meanings in American culture.” “Americans’ cultural meanings” can be diverse, whereas “meanings in American culture” implies that American culture is a single thing.

To analyze people’s meanings, I paid attention not only to what they said but also to how they expressed their views. For example, when Robert Milner stated proudly, “We got married. We bought the home. […] We have two kids. That whole—you know?” he assumed that this cultural model of a desirable life needed neither further elaboration nor defense. Similarly, he did not explain or defend his comment, “I don’t live to work.” In both comments, his wording suggests he believes his attitudes about what matters in life have a strong cultural standing. The cultural standing of a view is its perceived acceptance in a social group.³⁵ My participants treated some ideas about working and not working in the United States as commonsensical and others as more debatable or controversial. Through cultural standing analysis, which I illustrate in subsequent chapters, we can see not only which views were frequently stated by my participants but also, and more importantly, which views they thought were widely shared in their social circles.

My discourse analysis also considered what my participants left unsaid, including the implicit cultural models they drew on to understand their experience. A cultural model is a shared schema, a simplified holistic mental representation.³⁶ These schemas furnish much of the taken-for-granted assumptions everyone acquires while growing up. They include cultural models of a good life, cultural models of a normal life for someone like you, and cultural models of the social categories that underlie judgments about who is “like you” and who is not. In ordinary conversation, it is rarely necessary to make all these understandings explicit. Researchers can ask about them, but people always leave unspoken more than they say. Thus, my analysis attends not only to what my participants said and how they said it but also to what they implied rather than stated.³⁷

Types of Unemployment

Being out of work is not a uniform state. The experience depends on the political and economic system, as well as typical labor markets for different types of workers. As I already discussed, the experience of being out of work also depends on the availability of options for sustaining a living—assistance from the state, community, and family—other than daily waged labor. Gender roles matter. Are both men and women expected to hold paying jobs? Is regular waged work a prerequisite for having a committed life partner or beginning a family? At a larger level, what is taken as normal in the society for different social groups at different life stages, and what is the place of work in a good life?³⁸

The experience of unemployment also depends on whether there have been wrenching changes in local labor markets. These affect whether the worker planned or foresaw being out of work; how long they are out of work in relation to how long they had expected to be out of work; and their prospects for occupational continuity—that is, whether they expect to be able to find the kind of work in which they have experience or training or instead will need to train for a new occupation. Subjectively, it also matters to the unemployed whether they are hearing sympathy for their situation in the current public discourse or instead are being publicly blamed for their plight. When unemployment is widespread and generally understood to be due to causes beyond the control of the displaced workers, as was the case at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020, there is usually greater public sympathy and more financial assistance from the government. That kind of unemployment is easier to bear than the isolation, stigma, and inadequate assistance experienced by those who cannot find work during a time of generally low unemployment.³⁹

These varying conditions matter for unemployed people’s ability to imagine the future and plan for it financially and psychologically. Fundamentally, these varying conditions shape the very sense of self for those not working and the way other people see them.

We can see those differences when comparing ethnographies of unemployment in the United States. Some of these studies depict the human costs of factory closings in the late 1970s and 1980s, which were devastating for the permanently displaced workers. By contrast, more recent descriptions of managerial and professional workers in well-paid but insecure postindustrial jobs show them as unconcerned—or even relieved—by short periods of unemployment.

The experience of my participants that I describe in the rest of this book does not fit either of these scenarios. They did not feel that life as they had known it was over, but they did not take their unemployment in stride as normal and expected either. It is important to understand how these contexts differ just in one country, never mind in entirely different political and economic contexts, which I discuss as well.

Cultural Resources for Making Meaning and Coping

It is common for those who study the ideologies available to unemployed Americans to divide them into two alternatives: individualistic ideologies and collectivist ideologies.⁷¹ As I explain shortly, those are not the only alternatives, but let us start with them.

Individualistic ideologies are more common than collectivist ideologies in the United States due to the common discourse that anyone can get ahead with talent and hard work. According to this discourse, it is up to you whether you end up rich, poor, or somewhere in between. Some researchers have found that this ideology of meritocratic individualism makes long-term unemployment psychologically more difficult for the unemployed because they blame themselves for their situation.⁷²

Surprisingly, I found only occasional self-blame among my participants for their continuing unemployment. Some blamed themselves for the missteps that led to their job loss, but they tried (not always successfully) to avoid self-blame in understanding why they had been out of work for so long.

One reason they tried to avoid self-blame is that it could impede their job search. Career counselors advised not blaming yourself for being out of work because doing so would undermine the self-confidence that job seekers need to project to potential employers. To sell yourself, you must build yourself up, not tear yourself down. If you start believing something is wrong with you, that it truly is your fault you are not working, it will make the job search much harder. When I asked Stephen Smith, a displaced executive, whether he ever blamed himself, as his wife did, for being out of work for nearly three years when we met, he replied, “I can’t go there. I’d give up the fight.” This “no shoulda, woulda, coulda” mindset discourages regrets. It is resolutely forward looking.⁷³

Selling yourself also means protecting yourself emotionally, because you are the product you are selling, as I heard a career counselor explain. Thus, it means taking time for self-care, such as listening to upbeat music, meditating, and exercising. These self-care practices helped my participants cope with long-term unemployment.⁷⁴

It also helped that my participants knew that unemployment rates were high at that time following the Great Recession and that they were not alone. I met many of them through career counseling sessions and support groups for the unemployed. Those meetings helped my participants build a shared identity as morally worthy people who worked hard at trying to find another job.⁷⁵

Widespread economic insecurity received a political framing when the Occupy movement spread throughout the country shortly after I began my research in the fall of 2011. Occupy protestors shifted blame away from individual job seekers, focusing instead on the commercial lenders and investment bankers whose predatory mortgage lending practices and financial instruments had caused the Great Recession. I noticed a sharp uptick in my participants’ collectivist interpretations of the Great Recession after the Occupy movement began. However, their political views varied, and only two became active with Occupy or related movements at that time.⁷⁶ For the majority, what proved to be more meaningful than a political-economic framing were their spiritual outlooks and positive thinking discourses.

Some of the most important cultural resources for my participants were their religious and spiritual beliefs, which are neither individualistic nor collectivistic. Katarina Spelling, Robert Milner, and ReNé McKnight were not alone in drawing on their Christian faith to understand their circumstances. I had not anticipated this phenomenon—perhaps because I am not religious myself. At that time, some southern California churches hosted support groups for the unemployed, but I found only one participant that way. Still, many of my participants said that their unemployment was part of God’s plan for them. For example, Ann Lopez, an unemployed IT worker, explained, “I believe in God. So, I do believe that he has a plan for me and I leave it in his hands.” That did not mean that she, or anyone else, sat back and waited for a miracle. Devout Christians engaged in the same job search efforts as everyone else, but with the balm of believing their time out of work was meant to be. Some saw their extended period of unemployment as a spiritual trial. They took comfort from the belief that ultimately the Lord has “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future” (Jeremiah 29:11), as a discussion leader explained when I attended a Career Coaching and Counseling Ministry lecture at an evangelical megachurch.

Contemporary Christian preaching in many churches departs from earlier theological interpretations of economic misfortunes. In Edward Wight Bakke’s comprehensive study of unemployed working men during the Great Depression in the 1930s, Protestants were inclined to think that their economic hardships were God’s punishment for their sins. Catholics believed that the greater their suffering in life, the greater their reward in the next life. Neither group spoke of a loving God who would redeem their troubles in this life.⁷⁷ By contrast, much Christian teaching at present portrays God as personal and loving—not distant and judgmental.⁷⁸ If a benevolent and all-powerful God puts you on the path of unemployment, it must be for a good reason. Believing that being out of work for many months or years is part of a loving God’s plan helped many of my participants not give up in despair. This view was usually voiced by Protestants, but I heard it as well from Catholics and members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Several other recent ethnographies of the unemployed in the United States note the same current Christian interpretations.⁷⁹ It is another way in which older descriptions of the Protestant work ethic, according to which not working is a personal moral failing, do not apply very well in the contemporary United States.

To be sure, other Christians among my participants, like Terrance West and Isabel Navarro, did not give a theological interpretation of their unemployment. Nor are all my participants Christian. Although only two have no religious affiliation or spiritual beliefs, there is some diversity among the rest: two are Jewish, two are Buddhist (of radically different sects), and one is Hindu. My participants also included several New Age spiritual seekers who sought the meaning of their unemployment in the workings of the universe, rather than the intentions of a deity. They typically spoke of lessons they were supposed to learn from economic adversity. As one such spiritual seeker put it, “This [being out of work] was here for a reason.” In total, about one-third of my participants drew on their religious or spiritual beliefs to find a reason why they were meant to be out of work at this time.

These views are an example of positive thinking, which is focused on the bright side of negative circumstances and expecting a change for the better. Some commentators worry that such positive thinking can lead to self-blame for job loss or serious illness: the reason you are down on your luck is that you were not thinking positively.⁸⁰ I saw some examples of that. Two of my New Age participants worried that they were sending thoughts about what they lacked into the universe, thereby continuing to attract lack into their lives. For most, however, the belief that they were meant to be in this situation and that they needed to focus on the positive to be successful in their job search led them to eschew self-blame for failing to think positively.⁸¹

That does not mean that my participants were always upbeat. By letting my participants talk at length for at least two initial interviews, I would hear not only about their determinedly positive takes but also their depression, anxiety, and, in a few cases, suicidal thoughts. Still, most tried to stay positive. ReNé McKnight, for example, never complained; it was only after she had found other living quarters that I learned that the guest house where she and her daughter were living when we first met had no working stove, heat, or hot water. The way I discovered her car was repossessed and she had to walk two miles to work was by asking about the road noise I heard when I called her one time. She tried to focus on what she could do to make a better future for herself and her daughter. She stated, “Things are going to be better. So, I just started thinking about the positive things and focusing on what I can do, instead of looking at the problem and my weaknesses.” As Robert Milner explained, from being out of work he learned “to be happy with just the simplest things,” and his debilitating pain and struggles to find another job “only make me stronger.”

These coping resources were necessary because their unemployment lasted for many months—in some cases, for years. They would need every possible source of encouragement, hope, and self-care to sustain themselves.

“Working” and “Unemployed”

“Work” has two meanings. One definition is “to perform work or fulfill duties regularly for wages or salary,” but another is “to exert oneself physically or mentally especially in sustained effort for a purpose or under compulsion or necessity.”⁸² As feminists, welfare rights activists, and those who study labor cross-culturally have long noted, it is dangerous to conflate those divergent meanings. Women caring for children, the disabled, and elderly in their families are engaged in necessary sustained effort, but they may be accused of lacking a good work ethic because they are not working for wages. What is the work ethic of dedicated community volunteers? Groups who sustain themselves through foraging, hunting, or subsistence farming or in economies where most people scrap together livelihoods from informal ways of making money do not “fulfill duties regularly for wages or salary,” but they still labor “under compulsion or necessity.”⁸³ In Germany, in response to cuts in the duration of unemployment benefits in the early 2000s, a movement arose of the unemployed who described themselves as erwerbslos (without income) rather than arbeitslos (without work) to emphasize that they still performed labor to find another job, contribute to their communities, and sustain themselves and those they cared about.⁸⁴

Several of my participants challenged the assumption that “work” is restricted to paid exertions. As I show in chapter 2, my participants often told me they “worked harder” looking for a job than do many people with jobs. I saw a hint of a broader way of thinking about “work” when Katarina called watching her toddler, as she was doing when we met for a follow-up interview, “this work.” For Sam Lennon, who had lived in communes, raised children, and taken a variety of retail and food service jobs before she became disabled, work did not have to be paid: “You work at brushing your teeth or your hair, or making dinner, or going through the trash cans looking for a can to recycle it so you can buy some food, or raking the yard, or feeding your animals. Everybody has to work. It’s just [that] some work pays money, and some work feeds your spirit.” For Gabriella Gomez, a yoga teacher and massage therapist, work is the way you share your “gifts, talents, attributes.” It is the way you “occupy yourself” so you can “be of service.” Their broader understandings of work are supported by thoughtful scholars such as John Budd, who defines work as “purposeful human activity involving physical or mental exertion that is not undertaken solely for pleasure and that has economic or symbolic value.”⁸⁵ To avoid repeating the phrase “waged work,” I will use “work” in its usual meaning of paid work. However, we would do well to question the artificial divide between paid and unpaid life-sustaining activities.

“Unemployed” is an ambiguous term as well. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics only counts as “unemployed” those who are not working at all at present and who have actively looked for work in the past four weeks. Unemployment rates thus omit the “discouraged workers” and others “marginally attached to the labor force,” who had not applied for jobs in the last four weeks but who had looked for work within the past year. Nor do unemployment rates count anyone who did any work at all for pay or profit in the week before the employment survey, even if it was just for one hour. The self-employed who received no income in the week before that survey are also left out; they are still officially considered to be employed.⁸⁶

The government needs fixed cutoff points for its statistics, but for the people I talked to, there were no such hard-and-fast lines. Exhausted by month after month of applying for jobs and not getting interviews or often any response at all to their application, they would ease up on their job search. However, if someone they knew gave them a tip, they would follow up on it, and nearly all still had hopes of returning to work even as years went by and their objective chances of being hired dwindled. In the meantime, many took any odd jobs they could find—yard work, modeling, grading for an online course, editing, chores for friends—to earn a little cash, but those occasional gigs were insufficient to pay their bills and they still considered themselves unemployed. Anthropologists of unemployment have talked to people who were earning a regular income, but who said they were unemployed because they were still looking for a job in their desired field. There are also many people who work hard in the shadow economy but would not be considered part of the labor force in official statistics.⁸⁷

Some of my participants were underemployed, rather than unemployed, meaning they were working part-time when they wanted to be working full-time or had jobs for which they were overqualified.⁸⁸ Katarina Spelling, for example, had part-time jobs when we met, but she was looking for a full-time job. Others were independent contractors, including a housecleaner and hairdressers who had lost many clients during the recession. They lacked sufficient work, but the government did not consider them to be “unemployed.” In the research for this book, I included anyone who considered themselves to be unemployed, even if they did not fit official definitions.

Overview

I did not design this study with the aim of comparing work meanings in different social subgroups in the United States. I prioritized multiple, in-depth interviews with a moderate number of people willing to meet repeatedly for lengthy interviews instead of shorter interviews with a larger number of randomly selected participants. Still, throughout the book, I will point out any patterns I noticed.

For example, I found no correspondence between race or ethnicity and work meanings. Thus, I do not routinely state each participant’s race or ethnicity, although this information is available in the appendix. More important than race or ethnicity was the divide between those who had a bachelor’s degree and those who did not. Education affected previous earnings, how they expected to live, and how they approached their job search.

The education, occupations, and outlooks of my immigrant participants varied as well: there was no one shared set of immigrant meanings of working and not working. One interesting pattern, however, is that immigrants who had not attained citizenship tended to be highly reluctant to apply for historically stigmatized government social welfare benefits like food stamps, even if they were legally entitled to receive them, as I explain in chapter 4.

Although I noticed few differences between most work meanings for unemployed women and men, gender mattered together with education when my participants spoke of the effects of unemployment on their relationship with a life partner or potential life partner. Many participants took for granted a contemporary version of a male breadwinning model that was shaped by the need for two incomes, given the high cost of living, but still assumed that men have the greater obligation to be household providers in heterosexual couples.

Despite the potential importance of the trends that I observed in my interviews, I worry that describing these patterns takes the life out of my findings. The contribution of this study lies in its qualitative details—the ways my participants described thoughts and feelings that resist easy categorization. Their stories and differing ways of thinking about work are the heart of this account.

The next three chapters are devoted to differing work ethics. Chapter 2 details the two current forms of Weber’s Protestant work ethic that I sketched earlier: a living-to-work ethic versus a diligent 9-to-5 work ethic. Chapter 3 examines the value of working to live well and how my participants felt when they became “flawed consumers,” as one social theorist puts it.⁸⁹ That chapter also describes varying meanings of unemployment for immigrants who were motivated by “the American dream” of a materially better life. Chapter 4 considers the motive of working to live; that is, to be self-supporting. Being self-supporting was not possible for many of my participants. The sources of support they turned to or ruled out were shaped by cultural understandings about what parents owe their adult children and what adult children owe their parents, whether other family members (for example, siblings) have any obligations to each other, limitations on the help one could request from friends or local communities, and prevalent social discourses about the meanings of different government social welfare programs.

Chapters 5 and 6 explore other meanings of being out of work beyond those associated with these work ethics. Chapter 5 considers the effects of unemployment on my participants’ gender identities and their relationships with their life partner, potential partner, and any children. Chapter 6 explores the meanings of specific jobs and occupations, an aspect of work meanings that is usually ignored in descriptions of Americans’ work ethic. There, I also consider what my participants meant when they said one or more of their jobs had been “fun.” When were they able to find pleasure from their job?

Finally, in chapter 7, I consider the social policy implications of my research. For example, are generous unemployment benefits a work disincentive? Would a universal basic income be desirable? At stake are clashing values about the place of paid work in a good life and a good society, values that cut across standard ideological divides. For example, the laborist Left and the socially conservative Right both believe waged work is necessary for a morally good and satisfying life. By contrast, post-work theorists on the Left and libertarians on the Right think it is more important to ensure that people are free to choose how to spend their time. I will explain why my ethnographic research leads me to a position that is neither laborist nor post-work.

In that final chapter, I also discuss the implications of this study beyond the United States at the present time, including work meanings in the future. By exploring the social and cultural factors shaping the meanings of work, we have a better understanding of how they might change. As the anthropologist Christine Jeske points out, one way to “challenge problematic dominant narratives” is “by uncovering counternarrative that already exist in a society.”⁹⁰ I hope to challenge problematic folk cultural descriptions of Americans’ work ethic by portraying the great variety of work ethics in the United States and quite likely in other societies as well.

Work seems like a serious topic. Some authors depict it as a site of alienation and exploitation. Others sanctify work as necessary for a meaningful life. However, the outlooks of my participants were more nuanced than these portrayals. Some did find their jobs very meaningful, but not all did. When they talked about their jobs as fun, they revealed a less serious way of looking at work. Furthermore, work was hardly all they cared about. Sometimes they preferred to talk about their health, hobbies, politics, spiritual concerns, or relationships with other people. This book is all about their meanings of work, but work is not all that made life meaningful for them, as we will see.