America and the Spirit of Work

“I’m not straightening ties for $4.50 an hour.”

Those immortal words are still with me. They were uttered to me in private when I worked at a men’s store when I was 17. It was from a coworker. The boss had just walked by and suggested that so long as there were no customers in the store, we should get busy making the products more wonderful.

My co-worker balked at the idea. It got me thinking. The store was not paying him to stand around. They were paying him to put value in order to get value out. They also have to pay the bills otherwise, which means that arguably an employee needs to add far MORE value into the company than he takes out.

The employment contract doesn’t work like a vending machine. You don’t stick money in and get a snack out. Employers invest in their employees, paying them far more than they are worth in the training period in hopes of subsidizing the losses on the other side. This is why anyone on the clock should be thrilled for the opportunity to work harder, become more valuable, and give back to his benefactors.

My friend did not get this. Sure enough, he was fired a few weeks later. As it should be. That kid wanted a “work/life balance.” He got it but without the remunerative work. By the way, I despise that half-century-old phrase. It implies that work is not part of life, and that a good life consists mainly of sloth. What an awful ethic!

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His chapter is mostly about finding love in one’s work, doing it not for the money (which is a sign, a symbol, a necessity) but because you adore making value with your hands and your mind. You will never really end up doing anything truly wonderful based on a financial incentive alone. Nor does competition—beating the other guy—suffice. Great achievements are born from within, a result of a dream, a dedication, a true love of making your life worth something.

I adore this chapter because all of this is completely forgotten. It’s much worse today than it was in the 1970s. For two and a half decades, the Fed has mostly been running a system of zero interest rates, which has ballooned up the corporate and financial sectors to appalling levels. For decades now, hiring has not really been about value in and value out, but the purchase of warm bodies with credentials.

Several generations now have been raised without remunerative labor in their teens, so they graduate from colleges with one, two, or three degrees without having the slightest knowledge of or experience with actual work. During all their prime years, from 16 to 25, they have learned all the wrong habits: sleep late, stay out late, do the minimum to get by, party like crazy, always put sloth above focus, friends above obligation, and comfort above anything that would result in stress, toil, or pain.

You can’t build productive economies this way. You can’t build happy lives this way.

With that has come a routine judgment of others based on their job and status: the less you have to work and the higher your pay, the greater the status. The more you have to work for every dime, the lower your status. Some people will simply not do a “low” job because they imagine themselves better.

This is not the attitude of a free society; it is the bias of a caste system. It breeds not community but disdain.

Something has to change. It likely will. It already is. Firings in general are on the rise in every sector. People assume that is a terrible thing. Actually, it could be the best thing that ever happened to people.

Here’s a story of a young woman I hired once and fired for incompetence. I was amazed that she later put me down as a reference for a future employee. That man called me. Thinking this through carefully, I said two things.

First, she was an awful employee. She did not complete her tasks. She complained constantly. She prioritized her social media over her job. She was unreliable. We were better off the instant she left the company.

The man on the phone said that this was the worst reference he had ever heard. But I told him to hold on.

In my experience, I said, people need to be fired from one or two jobs before they figure it out. They have time to reflect on what went wrong. They never want to have it happen again because the feeling of failure and financial insecurity is so profoundly depressing.

I continued: “Something tells me that she could now be a wonderful employee. That she put me down as a reference tells you something. She is confident that she knows and I know what went wrong. It suggests that she is ready for a change. I say hire her. She could be your best worker ever.”

He thanked me for the strangest work reference conversation he had ever had. He called back a year later. You know the final chapter of this story: he said that she was indeed fantastic.