“Pull yourself up by your bootstraps” might as well be an American saying; trouble is, it doesn’t always work. Journalist and author Adam Chandler joins host Krys Boyd to discuss the myth of meritocracy, his travels around the country talking with people from all walks of life who have the work ethic but success still eludes them, and what needs to change for us to really obtain that American dream. His book is “99% Perspiration: A New Working History of the American Way of Life.”
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Transcript
Krys Boyd [00:00:00] You know, the classic American advice to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. It suggests that relentless effort is the one thing that stands between ambitious people and success. Except we’ve forgotten that the expression originated as a joke because, you know, it’s actually physically impossible to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. From Kera in Dallas, this is Think. I’m Krys Boyd. It is not that nobody achieves material success in this country or that work isn’t necessary for pretty much any human endeavor. But from the start, our national culture often linked economic well-being with moral worthiness via hard and dedicated labor. And for centuries, people toiling away without getting anywhere near prosperity have been told the solution is just to keep doing the thing that has failed to yield results except do it more. So what is the cost of our national work obsession? Journalist Adam Chandler explores this in his new book, “99% Perspiration: A New Working History of the American Way of Life.” Adam, welcome to Think.
Adam Chandler [00:01:05] Thanks so much for having me, Krys.
Krys Boyd [00:01:06] The thing you take aim at here is a concept you call American Abracadabra. What is this magical belief we have?
Adam Chandler [00:01:13] Well, essentially, when we think about the abracadabra, it’s it’s sort of like the bootstraps myth. It’s the lived in companion to it. As you mentioned, the bootstraps myth is this classic American idea that it’s up to you to pull yourself toward success. And the abracadabra is the sleight of hand, sort of a magic trick that says if you don’t make it in America, the land of opportunity, it’s because you’re not trying hard enough. And so it turns success or failure into a matter of individual character. Rather than have us collectively confront the obstacles that have made it so much harder to achieve in recent years.
Krys Boyd [00:01:50] People have jobs in every single part of the world. They perform labor even in like hunter gatherer cultures that don’t engage heavily with the monetary economy. What makes American work culture unique then.
Adam Chandler [00:02:03] Part of it, is that we work so much and compared to our market basket economies are the countries we compare ourselves most to. We log more hours, we take fewer vacations, we travel more and move more for work than most of the countries we compare ourselves to. And so it starts with that. But it also starts with the fact that in recent decades we’ve been working more for less. American workers have become 64% more productive since the late 1970s, and their pay has only increased 17%. I guess to put it another way, the economy has more than doubled in that time. And many Americans, especially people of color and Americans without college degrees, they’re making less than they did 40 years ago in real wages. And that’s sort of why we are in this moment where we are kind of questioning everything and why there’s real palpable anger. We don’t have a social safety net that supports people that happen to fall through the cracks. And that’s a big reason why so many people feel left behind.
Krys Boyd [00:03:13] To go to the title of your book, What did Thomas Edison mean when he talked about genius being 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration?
Adam Chandler [00:03:22] Essentially, you could you may recognize this quote from a high school hallway poster or self-improvement blog or commercials from brokerage firms. It’s everywhere. And it’s this bit of received wisdom about how hard work is the answer to every quest or dream or problem in American life. And of course, the myth is plenty of people are working hard in America and they aren’t achieving their wildest dreams. They’re barely getting by. And I don’t mean to pick on Edison, but he’s actually someone who has historically been cast as a singular genius, despite the fact that it took strangers, funders, government investment, some well-placed connections and dumb luck for him to become Edison. The light bulb, for example, was this world changing innovation. And a large part of the credit should go to someone like Lewis Latimer, who’s a black American inventor who created the carbon filament which made the light bulb that Edison gets credit for affordable and more accessible to the masses. But we tend to cherish the individual in an American life.
Krys Boyd [00:04:25] And today, Elon Musk uses similar logic not only to like apply to himself keeping his many companies humming along, but to justify expecting his workers to do the same. You write about his sort of exposition of how many hours he expects his folks to put in at the office.
Adam Chandler [00:04:43] Right. Elon Musk has a a formula that he honed and again, fired off in some tweets a few years ago. So it’s hard to know how much thought was put into it. But essentially, he wants his workers to in order to succeed, in order to change the world, as he puts it, to work it. Least 80 hours a week and hopefully 100 hours a week. That’s where the pain gets much more exponential, he says. But it’s also where the rewards come in from all of this extra work. And unfortunately, if you look at some of the safety records of his companies, they’re not great. A lot of things happen when you work that hard. A lot of regulations and a lot of procedures kind of lose their footing and people end up getting injured or burnt out. And it’s a it’s a nice microcosm for the sense that a lot of Americans have, even when they’re not doing something as grandiose as going to space or, you know, inventing new new automobiles.
Krys Boyd [00:05:39] What does our American abracadabra have to do with toxic and divisive politics?
Adam Chandler [00:05:47] Well, that’s a great question. I think there’s a immense amount of frustration that we have right now because we’re working so much harder for so much less and we know it. There was a Gallup Economic Opportunity poll a few years ago that found 39% of Americans believe that they were failing to get ahead despite working hard. And that figure 20 years earlier was just 23%. And so the failure for us to get where we want to be because of what we’re told, where we’re supposed to be through hard work and through applying ourselves, is a key force in what’s driving resentment, distrust of institutions, xenophobia, extremism. And that’s a huge reason why we’re at odds. And we’re embittered by the current state of work and life in America.
Krys Boyd [00:06:35] And the assumption is anybody struggling to make ends meet in this country just isn’t trying hard enough.
Adam Chandler [00:06:41] Exactly. And it’s not just something that’s a cultural trope. It’s something that’s written into policy. If you look at the way that we talk about unemployment or SNAP benefits, basic safeguards in our social safety net, a lot of them revolve around the idea of work and worthiness that really bring up some important questions about what it actually means to be productive in American life. We don’t really take care of people who are. Raising kids at home or taking care of the sick or the infirm or the elderly. These are jobs that are often go unpaid. And as a result of it, we kind of don’t see them as real work and we don’t compensate them as real work. And that’s a really big problem as our population ages and as we find the price of childcare to in some some instances be as much as rent or mortgages, some markets.
Krys Boyd [00:07:39] Let’s go back in history here. You note that our mythmaking around Christopher Columbus voyages helped set us up for like veneration of strivers. What were the takeaways from that story as as we told it to ourselves?
Adam Chandler [00:07:54] Right. But looking back at Columbus, there is this noble mission in mind of someone who’s going to cross the sea where no one else has wanted to go or dared to go before. And it’s it’s sort of cast as this eye, this virtuous move on on Columbus’s part. In children’s books, we see it kind of rendered as he’s going to prove that the world is round, even though at the time most people knew that the world wasn’t flat. We have essentially ascribed this mission to him of being this discoverer of a new world. But the reality is that the place he arrived had more people in the new world, as we call it, had a bigger population than the Europe he left from. And there were cultures and rights and customs there that had their own significance. And we tend to forget that and basically give him the status of being America’s discoverer. And in that idea, we really kind of miss a lot of what gets replaced when a new culture arrives and becomes the top of the pecking order.
Krys Boyd [00:09:06] We often refer to the Protestant work ethic as an inspiration for ideas about the value of effort. What were some of the reasons the earliest English colonies on this continent came to see work as a way to gain God’s favor?
Adam Chandler [00:09:22] Right in in the early days of Plymouth and basically the early days of American life on the colonies. And back then they were British colonies. We were looking at work as the only thing that secure could secure favor in the eyes of God. You had a vocation, you had a calling, and it was a religious calling. It wasn’t a secular calling. It was meant to basically give you a sense of virtue and importance and striving towards something. And you looked askance at people who didn’t work hard. And so the way that we’ve kind of lionized this part of the Protestant work ethic is something that is. Gone from being a niche in its time, a niche dynamic to something that basically informed the national culture. Benjamin Franklin takes up the protestant work ethic and kind of makes it secular over the years, and you can see the idea of just working endlessly and tirelessly toward a goal as something that we also exhibit in our modern hustle culture in the side gigs that we do in the gig economy. They’re all about just trying to get through and not really asking questions about what it would mean to. Be better in tune with a community that could collectively push ourselves towards common goals as opposed to being individualistic. And that’s a big part of why I think a lot of the questions we have right now about American life are so muddied. We we aren’t really looking at what would be best for our communities. We’re focused on our own individual aspirations because we’re told to do that.
Krys Boyd [00:11:08] And of course, in reality, work alone would never have been enough to I don’t know about salvation that’s beyond my pay grade, but it wouldn’t have keep then. It wouldn’t have kept those early colonies alive. Right? Those settlers were often in over their heads. They benefited from living near indigenous civilizations that knew what they were doing.
Adam Chandler [00:11:27] Absolutely. The interdependence of the Pilgrims and the story of the first Thanksgiving is a pretty great example of what it means to have people around you who will teach you how to hunt and fish and gather in a place that is completely unfamiliar to you is a terrain that is that is new. The pilgrims themselves had come from Holland and from England and textile industries. They didn’t really know how to fish or forage, and the indigenous tribes nearby taught them how to do that and how to survive. And they lived together somewhat peaceably, admittedly with some tension over the years until it broke out into war decades down the line. But the story of of the Pilgrims isn’t individual aspiration or working hard. It’s figuring out how to how to band together and find common ground in difficult circumstances and survive as a result of those efforts.
Krys Boyd [00:12:21] How did our early history of enslaving people affect the ways white Americans talked about the importance of work?
Adam Chandler [00:12:31] It’s a great question because it’s a difficult question, and that’s something that I think we have difficulty reckoning with. Oftentimes we talk about American history as being virtuous because. It shed a lot of the feudal baggage of Europe. You could arrive here and become anything you wanted to be, and that’s something that is a cherished part of the American experience. And for many people it’s been true. However, the the aspect of America’s independence and its founding documents all point to this idea of coming alive, singing songs to liberty and freedom. And the reality is that that wasn’t the experience for a lot of Americans. And there were barriers to opportunity that carry through all the way till today. And it’s not a perfect picture of equality. And we we fail to reckon with that because it’s it’s difficult to admit that we haven’t reached our promise yet. And it’s enraging for a lot of people to kind of think, you know, I made it in this place by working hard, but sometimes my success came at the expense of others. Oftentimes it did. And it’s it’s a it’s a challenge to have those kinds of conversations when the narrative around how we came about to become the most powerful country and the richest country in history says something else is based on a different set of understandings.
Krys Boyd [00:14:05] Adam, you’re a journalist and an author. These are not necessarily known as like high dollar professions. I’m guessing that you like what you do. Talk a little bit about how it’s possible to feel like you found work that really fills you up emotionally, but still critique the way we talk about work in this country.
Adam Chandler [00:14:30] Right. I’m incredibly lucky to have the opportunity to talk to people for a living, hear their stories, write about pressing issues, and the industry doesn’t necessarily support a lot of people anymore that that can do that. And so while I love what I do, I also point to a lot of the shortcomings that exist in the industry and all industries, in part because when you have what some would call a dream job, it asks you to make sacrifices. It asks you to take lower salaries, work longer hours. It it really relies on. People wrapping their selves in the identity of their work to compensate for the fact that it’s often not sustainable. It’s often not the kind of job that sets you on a long course for stability. And it’s a dangerous thing to be identified and defined by your work because industries are constantly changing and there are business decisions that factor into everything that happens at a job, even a dream job. Whether it’s investors or bad management or owners or market changes. You you really can’t bank on how you love your job. If there are all these external factors that can determine whether or not your industry survives or whether it just makes calculating business decisions because that’s just the nature of the world. We’ve accepted that broadly, not just in dream jobs, but in all jobs where we find ourselves in situations where we’re willing to accept less because it sounds good. It feels good. It seems good. And that’s why I think a lot of people give up on some of their passions or pursue something that is safer as a result of it. And we’re a poorer culture as a result of it.
Krys Boyd [00:16:32] We are drawn collectively to success stories that glorify individual talent and efforts. I actually loved the first time I learned about Madam C.J. Walker, the first black woman, in fact, the first woman in this country to become a self-made millionaire. She had this line of cosmetics and hair products in the early 20th century. She unquestionably achieved remarkable things. But you note that the way her story sometimes gets told leaves out all the other people who contributed to her success.
Adam Chandler [00:17:04] Yes, absolutely. I love this story in large part because I didn’t really know it. I stumbled upon it when I was reporting in Indiana, and she had a business that was devoted toward beauty products for black women. And she made her success in large part because the market had ignored her clients, hurt her, her target market had been looked over by mainstream beauty, beauty products and beauty industry at that time. And her story is impressive because she builds this business out of her associations with her community. She empowers women to become sales salespeople at the time to find their way into success without a lot of training, without a lot of support or capital. And those are things that get overlooked when they make a movie called Self-made, which was the the Netflix story, a fictionalized or dramatized version of her life. Mattel made a Barbie doll for their inspiring women line of dolls that they introduced a few years ago. And it focuses on a quote of hers that says, you know, if you want to make art, if you want to make it, get off your you know, get off yourself, your your seat, sorry, get off your seat and and do it. And so that’s not the direct quote, but that’s the essence of the of the story is that. It’s up to you individually to find your way to success. And it has little to do with the people around you and the mentors and the church groups and the community members that ultimately support you in your pursuits. And I think that that’s kind of emblematic of a lot that we miss in the story of success in American life.
Krys Boyd [00:18:55] I was fascinated to learn in your book that the treasured American expression of rugged individualism was coined by none other than Herbert Hoover, who of course, was presiding over the government at precisely the time the economy came crashing down in the Great Depression. Does the celebration of individualism essentially presume that it is somehow un-American to need help?
Adam Chandler [00:19:19] Absolutely. The idea that you are not self-reliant is the most shameful thing you can possibly be in American life. It is pitiful to need help. And our welfare policies kind of project that idea. A lot of our cultural sort of signifiers in messaging project, the idea that if you need help, you’re in trouble. And this is something that. Is, I think, what’s fueling a lot of the masculinity crisis, as it’s been called around being being a provider or finding jobs that don’t reflect traditional masculine ideals. We’re seeing this. Come up in a lot of really new and distressing ways as we kind of move forward in an economy that is less stable than it’s ever been in terms of full time work, in terms of steady careers. You know, we’re way past the gold watch and pension years. And, you know, in the book, I talk to people who see this with their own eyes and don’t really know how to reckon with what it means to need help. It’s, you know, talking to a pastor in rural Alabama who becomes this community pillar in large part because people feel comfortable talking to him. But that also opens him up to all of these problems that people are having that they feel they can only confide to one person in because they’re trustworthy. And if you look around, we put so much emphasis on. Doing the work yourself or getting yourself out of hole that we don’t think about the circumstances that put us in those places, whether it’s the cost of housing, health care or child care or tuition, and how those things have skyrocketed over the years.
Krys Boyd [00:21:06] I really hadn’t thought about how the if you want to call it a crisis within masculinity in the 21st Century might relate back to the reluctance to ask for help, the sense that people aren’t able to make it on their own, but they don’t want to look around and see what might be out there. I mean, I don’t know your age. You you look like a young guy. I mean, is this something you’ve felt specifically within your generation of men?
Adam Chandler [00:21:31] Well, I mean, I’m what they call a geriatric millennial, which is a term that I absolutely hate. But I am an older millennial and I kind of got to view the sort of halcyon days of American life as a as a kid in the 90s when the US was a unipolar sort of power and we were seeing the end of the Cold War make America this. Formidable cultural force and place of aspiration. And we look back on those days fondly. But there is a hollowing out that was going on that eventually put a lot of American dreams out of reach. And so I’m of a generation that either graduated into the Great Recession or graduated a few years before the Great Recession, if we’re talking about college. And those are moments that kind of forever changed the calculus of what it means to get by and what it means to be successful. It’s narrowed the field and it’s sort of limited what we could do in terms of what fields we chose. How we started to view things like college is more transactional than expansive in in building well-rounded humans with the capacity to think creatively. And there’s a lot of disenchantment that goes along with that. And I honestly feel more for people who are younger than me, who are growing up without a sense of what it’s like to not feel. Pressures to steer yourself certain ways. We had an element of freedom that I think is has now gone and decentralized and fragmented. And it’s a challenge to to watch younger generations struggle with it. But it goes all the way up. It goes all the way up and through. And that instability is something that even the oldest people around can tell you about as people are having to work harder and longer into life just to be able to keep up with the cost of living or to stay relevant in a culture that that prioritizes productivity over just existing in a community.
Krys Boyd [00:23:50] Pretty much every wave of immigration to this country from different destinations around the world has led to intense backlash from people that were here previously. And I guess the pattern works something like this. We expect immigrants to prove themselves worthy of staying by working incredibly hard, and then we get upset with them for taking our jobs.
Adam Chandler [00:24:14] Yes, that’s that is unfortunately part of the dynamic here. It’s from the Pilgrim onward. America’s fixture is a place for immigrants to find refuge. And Prosper has been sort of our global calling card. We have the biggest immigrant population in the world, and it’s something that leaders tend to celebrate in campaign biographies and then kind of condemn. On the stump there is this looking askance at people who eventually work into through second or third generations into really highly coveted jobs. And a resentment builds toward that. And we see it in backlashes and we see it in exclusionary practices. And it’s something that you can sort of watch, too, when you’re marking the American epics. It’s something that you don’t have to look at modern day America to see. You can look at the 1970s, you could look at the Great Depression era where we were expelling Mexican-Americans and people of Hispanic descent out of the country, out of fear of losing jobs. The Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, all of these sort of hallmarks of of American life are populated with these stories of resentment and exclusion and hostility toward newcomers, but also people who had been here for years.
Krys Boyd [00:25:36] How did the marketing of frontier mythology through events like the Columbian Exposition, contribute to the way we have conceived of work and rewards ever after?
Adam Chandler [00:25:48] Right. When we talk about rugged individualism, we talk about the image of self-reliant Americans. Few things come to mind for me, at least more than the the image of the frontier and rough hewn cowboys with their plowing shares just kind of clearing a pathway west. And this is another popular myth. And this was something that was very much a part of the Colombian exposition, The World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893, where you had all of this heavy handed frontier worship around cowboys and the exciting things that were happening on the western frontier. And the reality of is that big business was tied up in what was happening. The cowboys that were driving cattle up, the trails were ultimately ending up in Chicago stockyards where they were, you know, shipped west or shipped east sorry. While land grants and other government incentives for settlers were part of what was driving migration westward. So a lot of what happened, even down to the building of the railroads, wasn’t this organic thing, but a conscious decision that was, again, based on. Individual desire to take certain territory, but also backed by government funds and by all kinds of other factors that really supercharge the growth westward. And you can see that down to the highway system, too. That’s another kind of modern frontier that has defined American life. The open road is something that us in individual cars would cherish, but also came about because we invested so much money in creating these systems for the benefit of the country.
Krys Boyd [00:27:37] So as a collective investment that allowed for our sense of individual mobility.
Adam Chandler [00:27:42] Exactly. Exactly right.
Krys Boyd [00:27:45] Just to jump ahead to more contemporary examples, Adam, you cite the Netflix show Emily in Paris as an example of how we imagine our work ethic in comparison to other countries without necessarily thinking about trade offs in equality or quality of life. How does that show present Emily as different fundamentally from her French coworkers?
Adam Chandler [00:28:06] Right. Well, I’m I’m embarrassed to say I’m the only one in my household that watches the show. My wife is named Emily and refues to watch it. So it’s always funny to call back to things that happened in the show and have it kind of land with crickets when I talk about it, but I’m excited to talk about it with you. The idea of Emily in Paris is that she is a midwestern marketing ingenue who arrives in Paris with nothing but her good old fashioned American work ethic to guide her through a very hostile French and work environment where being a go getter and getting ahead is looked upon as suspicious and perhaps even evil. And so what what makes the show work is that there is this fundamental, fundamental image of America as this place where you’re constantly striving and you’re careerist and you’re focused on getting ahead. And in France, that falls flat because their culture has a lot of emphasis on leisure and time off and and not sacrificing your free time for work to get ahead. It’s it’s seen as suspicious and it seemed as it’s seen as problematic. And so the show really brings about these really contrasts these two cultures in a way that I think is is clever and funny and could only work between America and France.
Krys Boyd [00:29:34] French workers are required by law to leave their desks to go have lunch.
Adam Chandler [00:29:41] Right. This old law that took place during the time of ventilation for tuberculosis and the French health code essentially said you need to leave your desk during the day of your workstation so we can ventilate workspaces. And what it meant was that workers would have to take a break outside of the office. And at first it was seen with some suspicion and eventually it was adopted and became a national kind of cherished rite of getting out of your office for a couple of hours during the day. And today, it’s still something that is a big part of how things operate in France. Things will businesses will close during the day for a couple of hours and you’ll see people visiting friends or bonding with coworkers over nonprofessional things. Or you’ll see people running errands and kind of managing their lives in ways that are difficult. If you work straight through at your desk and you eat, eat salad or lunch at your desk. The way that we’re sort of conditioned to do in a lot of ways in America.
Krys Boyd [00:30:45] Adam Just to go back to France for a minute, I mean, many people will be aware that French leaders have been concerned about their country’s less than eager workforce and the expectation workers have of a comparatively early retirement. I mean, there may be some productivity losses to their approach. On the other hand, they tend to live, what, significantly longer on average than we do.
Adam Chandler [00:31:12] Right. We we spend significantly more on our health care and live about five years less than the average French person here in America. And that kind of speaks to some of the tradeoffs we’ve made for our lives. We talk about how America is this exceptional place, but the reality in a lot of instances when you compare ourselves to a place like France is we don’t we spend we have an hour less per day to sleep. We have an hour less per day dedicated to leisure than French on average. And if we’re working this much, what should we get in return? If it’s supposed to be money? It hasn’t been the case for in decades that life and work have kept up with the pace of the cost of living in a lot of ways. And also, if we’re working hard, why don’t we take our vacations when we need to, when we should we have this allotted time that again, would benefit all of us to take. But we tend not to do it here because in some ways it’s seen as a sign of weakness or disloyalty or because it’s so precarious here we don’t have the union backing or we don’t have the institutional support for worker’s rights here that make people feel comfortable disconnecting from their jobs. And so they make these sacrifices oftentimes without really thinking about it, because there is this humming precarity underneath it all.
Krys Boyd [00:32:43] So everybody understands that the U.S. is, you know, faced with a lot of economic inequality. I think one interesting difference between the modern U.S. and other deeply unequal societies is that while, like British lords from the 19th century might have thought it was embarrassing to do any sort of work because that was pedestrian. Here the wealthiest people are likely to report working the most hours. Adam that would seem to indicate some link between long hours and success. Can you give us some context?
Adam Chandler [00:33:19] Yes. Well, in in the late 1800s, if you were wealthy, you flaunted your wealth by not working. And in the last several decades, we’ve kind of switched that entirely. The idea that we had these predictions of long standing conventions where you wouldn’t work were shattered when ultimately work became this source of identification. The journalist Derrick Thompson calls this theory workism. But. It privileges looking busy seeming busy as as a way to sort of derive meaning in a time where people are spending less time with their friends. They’re going to churches and civic groups less often. Work has become a way to identify yourself and your importance, especially in a time of inequality and precarity. You don’t want to be seen as somebody who’s kind of sliding by while other people are failing to keep ahead. So there are all these factors that really inform why people feel like they need to be busy or seem busy in ways that. Would seem foreign and strange to other countries that again, we often compare ourselves to where if you’re working late and it’s 7:00 in the office, that’s not seen as heroic. In a place like Denmark, it’s seen as a failure or an inefficiency. And those are the kinds of stories that we should be telling ourselves a little bit more in order to really recapture what it means to have a life outside of work and to be a part of community and be there for friends and family members. There was a Pew study recently that listed having a career as being having a good career as being the most important aspect of fulfilling life ahead of marriage, ahead of close friendships and ahead of family. And I think that that really speaks to the idea that having a good job in America is central to what it means to have a good life. But if you zoom out and look at all the data around it, that really doesn’t seem to be true.
Krys Boyd [00:35:26] Sometimes we might hear with envy about companies offering certain kinds of benefits to white collar workers, Right? Like catered lunches and in-house gyms and dry cleaning. They all sound great until you realize the net effect is really causing people to spend more time in the office.
Adam Chandler [00:35:46] Right, Exactly. There’s been this arms race to try and lure talented workers, especially in tech and law and other high paying industries. Really focusing on this these battery of perks for well-funded companies and less food. So if you have breakfast, lunch and dinner at your office, that means you’re not perhaps having breakfast, lunch and dinner at home or out of the office because it’s free. The idea that if you’re a woman who is thinking about her reproductive health or wants to do family planning, you can have your egg freezing treatments covered by your boss to delay family planning and stay on the job for a few more years. It’s meant to be a battery of perks, but it really often just kind of signals that you should stay at the office and even unlimited vacation, which is something that companies like Oracle and General Electric and Netflix show offer. They are proven over studies to have employees ultimately take fewer days off even when they’re given an endless allotment of them, in large part because they don’t feel like they’re real, real days you can take. So it is a fascinating fixture to have all of these perks in modern business and have them. Not really. Give you the time off or the sort of life outside of work that you would think having all these benefits would give you. They’re seen as conveniences, but they really just kind of keep you tethered.
Krys Boyd [00:37:32] You write that the white collar trend of overwork coincides with the decline in religious affiliation and socialization outside of work? I mean, correlation is not causation. But you think in this case there may be some some link, right?
Adam Chandler [00:37:50] Right. Well, one thing that surprised me is thinking about the cultural and sort of civic reboot that we need when we talk about work. And a lot of it is. Sort of predicated on hobbies becoming side hustles and leisure going away. And what we do, being extensions of our own personal brands and as we participate less in our communities socially and civically. This is something that Oldenburg, who coined the term third places in Robert Putnam, who wrote Bowling Alone to start talking about decades ago. We’ve narrowed our ability through because of work to see each other clearly and to create effective feedback mechanisms and sort of operate in good faith towards one another. And it’s costing us dearly in this way to just have a clear sense of what the needs of the needs of life are as a society and as communities. It’s all focused on the individual in a way.
Krys Boyd [00:38:53] This hustle culture is often held up as a signifier that some individual is trying really hard to make a good life for themselves to get ahead. What do we know about this? Are most of those gig workers choosing to work extra hours and extra jobs, or do they feel like they have to in order to keep body and soul together?
Adam Chandler [00:39:14] When you look at the data around the gig economy and what it ultimately provides for its workers, you’ll see that a lot of people are working several, several different jobs. And I’ve done some of them myself just to sort of experience what what’s asked of you as a person, as a worker. And it’s a lot of time off where you’re not getting paid while you’re waiting for you’re waiting for an assignment, you’re waiting for something to come through. And that often means you’re not working for even a minimum wage and you’re just kind of on your own. There’s no real institutional support from these from these platforms, and it is something that kind of funnels you into working harder because you’re trying to keep up and make more money. But. It’s no substitute for what a steady job would be, even if it offers flexibility of working whenever you want. If you’re working whenever you want, how do you create boundaries in your life? And again, it sounds like a luxury to be able to do that at this point. But we’ve made a decision to allow work to bleed into our off hours, whether it’s driving an Uber around or having your email on your phone and accepting work calls and even text messages from coworkers. We’re working all the time and it’s affecting. It’s affecting us. Our levels of happiness are our physical fitness, our relationships in ways that we are only beginning to grapple with.
Krys Boyd [00:40:49] Let’s be clear, Adam. No one receives their tax bill in any form. And thanks. Okay. Take it to pay taxes now. But I mean, how do you think our work culture contributes to the idea that paying any taxes for anything is somehow a strategy to pickpocket the hard workers and benefit the slackers?
Adam Chandler [00:41:09] Well, taxes will never be popular in the United States, but tax paying is very popular. It offers us a a sense of citizenship that we’re contributing to the whole that we are funding teachers and police officers and police departments and fire departments and roads and all kinds of things to make our society function. And it’s seen as a form of patriotism. We could rely on different forms of patriotism, whether it’s, you know, national service or again, volunteering, finding ways to plug yourself into your community more. But taxpayers become a shorthand for being an upstanding, contributing citizen. And unfortunately. When we think about who benefits from taxes, we often villainize people who are working hard and yes, may need food stamps or may need a 10th Temporary Assistance for Needy Families or may need Medicaid. And we in doing so, we tend not to focus on all the tax breaks that wealthier people get over the years, whether it’s for one case or employer sponsored health insurance, which is essentially a tax write off for employers. And all of these different ways that. Our tax benefits, whether it’s capital gains, where your income is taxed more than your assets. We have all of these different mechanisms that make it, again, shameful to need help from taxpayer money, but only if you’re struggling, if you’re doing well, or if you are gainfully employed and you’re still benefiting from our tax system. We tend not to demonize or villainize those people.
Krys Boyd [00:42:56] So, look, nobody is going to turn this ship around single handedly if we’re hearing this and disturbed by the idea that work has taken a too central place in our culture and our sense of personal identity. What can we do about that without, you know, becoming president of the country?
Adam Chandler [00:43:16] Well, it’s a great question. And one of the things that I really enjoyed doing while reporting this book was traveling around and talking to different people about work and about their communities and finding the hopeful elements. You know, we live in a country where people are kind and caring, even if our chosen policies are not kind or caring. And so there are certain things that would just make life better and easier that we’ve experimented with in the past. And we’ve experimented with pretty recently. One of one of the big initiatives of the pandemic was the expanded child tax credit, which gave all families, including poorer ones, that previously weren’t eligible for the tax credit, 250 or $300 a month for each child. And what that essentially did was say child care is work and that we can basically support families in this way to be steadier and safer during difficult times. And difficult times aren’t just pandemics. They are years and years of income inequality and the hollowing out of jobs and the offshoring of jobs. And so something like the expanded child tax credit was instrumental in changing the calculus of the country for a very brief period of time. It cut child poverty by over half and then it expired. And some states have introduced their own versions, but they’ve been tested and they’ve made our economy better and our working culture healthier and our society more productive. These are things that would change the shape of life in America and show how government can be responsive to people’s needs. And unfortunately, we just couldn’t get it passed again. We couldn’t get it extended because there is this hostility and animosity toward helping people through taxpayer initiatives. And that’s just one, one, one solution that would make a huge difference.
Krys Boyd [00:45:12] Adam Chandler is a journalist and he is author of the new book “99% Perspiration: A New Working History of the American Way of Life.” Adam, thank you so much for making time to talk.
Adam Chandler [00:45:24] Thanks so much for having me. It’s a real pleasure.
Krys Boyd [00:45:26] Think is distributed by PRX, the public radio exchange. You can find us on Facebook and Instagram and listen to our podcast wherever you get podcasts. You’ll find it by searching for KERA Think. Our website is think.kera.org. Again, I’m Krys Boyd. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.
