Why Does Work Suck for So Many Workers? It All Started With a Flawed Understanding of the Protestant Work Ethic

Brigid Schulte: When we talk about the Protestant work ethic in the United States, that’s often code for “work ‘til you drop.”

Elizabeth Anderson: Exactly.

Schulte: Just work and work and work and it doesn’t matter whether you’re paid well or treated well, because you’ll get your reward later.

Anderson: In Heaven. In the next life. Not this one. [Laughing.]

Schulte: So I was shocked to learn in your book that there are actually two versions of the Protestant work ethic. Can you explain?

Anderson: My book, Hijacked, is a history of the Protestant work ethic starting in the seventeenth century in England. What we know of as the work ethic was an invention of Puritan theologians. It comes down to us through the great sociologist Max Weber as a doctrine that tells workers: “Nose to the grindstone. Work ‘til you drop, and you'll get your reward in the next life.” The whole purpose was to maximize the profits of the employer.

I was curious about this, so I decided to go back and actually read the sermons and ethical treatises of the theologians that Weber had read. That was a breakthrough moment. I saw that he had given a very selective reading of these people. The Puritans have a pretty bad rap these days. But they're much more humane and thoughtful moralists than one would expect.

A big theme that comes out is the “equality of callings.” Puritans thought God calls every individual to a particular specialized occupation to which they should dedicate their lives on earth. And the point is, it's all part of a division of labor. It only helps human beings and society as a whole if everyone works together in their own role. Imagine all the little gears and springs in a clock. None of those gears are worth anything unless all the others are helping the others move along. All callings are equal. Every gear has to be there. It doesn’t matter if you have a big shot role, or you’re a street sweeper. You’re all contributing to the overall goodness of society, so everybody is entitled to be honored as long as they do their duty in the right spirit.

[The Puritans] also drew some very important economic implications from this. Every worker is entitled to a living wage and safe working conditions. They're entitled not to have a tyrannical boss, so the boss shouldn't try to wheedle work out of them by yelling and screaming at them. They actually have to treat the workers with respect and kindness.

Importantly, there's even a feminist strain. Shocking, right? But if every last individual has a calling, what about women who aren't in the paid workforce? And they said, “They're following a calling if they're raising children. They are educators. Their specialized occupation is child development and education. And that is obviously socially necessary, so women should be honored, too, for their labor.” [The Puritans are] explicit about this. So, a calling doesn't have to be attached to a paid job. And that's super important because, as we know, a lot of the labor that's done that's socially necessary and that people need to flourish is done internally in the family.

Child care, elder care, volunteer work for the community—any disciplined activity dedicated to promoting the welfare of other people or society at large counts as a calling. It should be honored. The people who do it are entitled to live. According to the Puritans, people who are disabled or unable to work are entitled to charity.

They also had a conception of meaningful work, which is work in which you promote the welfare of other people and of society by using skills and talents that you enjoy exercising.

Schulte. Wow. That sounds so hopeful. So how did that version of the Protestant work ethic get hijacked, as you write?

Anderson: The big split happens in the late 18th century. One view of the work ethic I call the “conservative work ethic,” and the other is the “progressive work ethic” or the pro-worker work ethic.

Let’s keep in mind that in seventeenth-century England, most people were pretty poor. And most people were engaged in agricultural labor. To be a successful farmer is awfully hard work. Survival was at stake. So, of course, you had to work hard. They took that for granted.

In the late eighteenth century, [adherents of] the conservative work ethic see the Industrial Revolution happening. It was built on the rise of factory labor, and factory labor was absolutely horrible. Workers were de-skilled. They were performing the same mechanical motion thousands of times a day. It dulls the mind. It's unbelievably boring, tedious drudgery. Workers are more prone to what we call today repetitive stress injuries and other kinds of injuries in the machine-driven factories that came later in the 19th century, due to the increased pace of labor. People are exhausted at the quick pace and they’re getting injured as a result.

The conservatives wanted to rationalize all that. So they hypothesized that, well, you need a large labor force that's working super hard to produce economic growth. But how do you get them to work hard enough? Their theory was that human beings are naturally sinful and naturally lazy, and the only way to get the poor to work hard enough is to pay them barely enough so that they can only survive if they work like crazy until they drop. So, it's the fear of starvation that will keep them working hard.

Adam Smith was the biggest opponent of this view. He said if you want workers to work hard, the thing to do is to pay them well so that they have a chance to improve their condition. Because everybody wants to have a chance to be better off as a result of their labor, pay them high and rising wages. Give them the prospect of prosperity, and don’t worry; they’ll be highly motivated to work. Adam Smith is one of the great originators of the pro-worker work ethic.

Schulte: Wait, Adam Smith? The Scottish economist known as the father of capitalism and the “invisible hand” of free market capitalism—that unregulated markets will deliver the best results—which some economists today say has led to a rapacious strain of capitalism in the United States and grotesque economic inequality?

Anderson: It’s true that Adam Smith was in favor of competitive markets—markets that are open to new entrants, as opposed to monopolies. He hated monopolies because monopolists would exploit everyone. They'd raise prices, and people wouldn't have any choice but to pay the higher prices. What people don’t understand is that his model was an economy largely based on self-employed workers.

At the time, you had the peasantry who were being oppressed by landlords. In England at the time, the population was about 10 or 11 million people, but only about 30,000 families had locked up virtually all of the productive farmland in England. So, a tiny number of people were monopolists. They raised the rents on farmers, who were doing all the work, and a lot of the profits went to the landlords. Smith’s idea was that legal mechanisms, like inheritance laws, kept the lords’ estates locked together in these giant bundles of land. But the lords themselves were basically lazy—overconsuming, gambling, doing all kinds of things that would typically lead to bankruptcy. But they had rigged the laws in such a way as to escape, so creditors couldn't come after them.

In the book, I quote Edmund Burke, the great conservative theorist. Burke made it very explicit that the job of the poor was to support the rich, who were in permanent dependency on the hard work of the poor. He never got around to explaining why there should be a privileged class that's entitled to extract wealth from the labor of others.

Schulte: So how did Smith’s ideas get so co-opted?

Anderson: Smith argued that if the laws were changed to make the lords pay their debts and changed inheritance laws so that the firstborn son couldn’t inherit the whole package intact, then the lords would be forced to sell off pieces of it to support their profligate lifestyle. Those little pieces then could be bought up by the most efficient farmers who were the peasants. Then, you would have a more or less equal distribution of land.

Similarly, Smith thought if you broke up the manufacturing monopolies, which were secured by state favors, then any skilled journeyman could set up his own shop and be able to trade. Under those circumstances, it's not ridiculous to think that free markets would work pretty well because nobody has any market power over anybody else.

The big problem is that Smith didn't anticipate the advent of large-scale factories of the machine age in the nineteenth century. At that point, an ordinary worker couldn’t own their own factory. So you get the rise of a very wealthy capitalist class making massively expensive capital investments, with hundreds of laborers under them being paid subsistence wages.

So, his vision of free-market capitalism ended up not delivering what he wanted it to deliver.

Schulte: What happened to his pro-worker interpretation of the Protestant work ethic? Why did the conservative view stick?

Anderson: The conservative view is very sticky in England and the United States. We are the premier neoliberal economies. In other countries, like Australia, there's a very high minimum wage, and Starbucks baristas have a decent life. People here are afraid that if poor workers are paid decently, somehow, it will come out of their pocket. But to the contrary, what they don't understand is that when you pay people decently, it energizes them to take initiative. It also improves child development. If a child grows up in a financially secure household, families are more likely to stay together. If kids grow up economically secure and have a really good preschool education, they have higher graduation rates, higher labor force participation, and lower crime rates. Practically every outcome you would want to see is better. Investments in young children especially have enormous payoffs later in life.

The conservative strain of the work ethic was basically the ideology of the capitalist class, the factory owners. They had an obvious interest in keeping wages down so they could maximize their profits. So they invented this idea that the poor were naturally lazy, and only if they faced poverty and precarity could they be induced to work hard enough to produce a surplus that would then be the basis for civilization.

Schulte: That invented idea about people in poverty is still really powerful in the twenty-first century, isn’t it?

Anderson: Absolutely. This conservative idea is deeply embedded in American welfare policy. If you listen to what conservatives say about welfare, they wring their hands that if you give “handouts,” people will just quit working. They're going to be lying in a hammock all lazy. That's been the eternal complaint about social welfare programs. But we know from numerous data that that isn't true. People who investigated the original welfare policy, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), didn’t find moms with young kids just lying on a hammock. They would typically rotate in and out of paid work. Why did they go on welfare? Often, their kids had some chronic illness, and they needed access to Medicaid, or they needed other things for their kids they couldn’t provide because they were in precarious positions. They were typically very eager to get back to work as soon as they could find a job that pays.

Schulte: I came across a Government Accountability Office report that found 70 percent of the people poor enough to qualify for public benefits like Medicaid were working full-time. It’s just not true that if people are struggling, it’s because they’re not working hard enough.

Anderson: These people are working hard. Really hard. We also have the rise of gig labor, part-time labor, or labor with very irregular hours. These people are completely exhausted. They might have to close, say, a Starbucks, and then open it the next morning. They're sleep-deprived. They don't have a regular schedule, so they can't predict their income from one week to the next. There's a lot of that precarity going on, which also forces some of them onto food stamps just to make ends meet. This is not the kind of situation anyone would choose because, it's exhausting drudgery.

Schulte: It’s so punishing. Why is this conservative view of the work ethic and the false premise that people are naturally lazy so sticky?

Anderson: Because people think that their pay reflects their virtue. People think, “I'm getting paid this because I deserve it. Look at how hard I've worked. Look at how frugally I've been saving away for a rainy day. The accumulation of my wealth is due to my own virtues. I'm entitled to keep everything.” In this mindset, inequalities in income and wealth must reflect how deserving people are.

It's not like that thinking is totally ungrounded. There are, in fact, better workers. However, only a small percentage of inequality can be explained that way. The reason for inequality is the overall structure of wages.

Think about inequality of incomes due to wages like rungs on a ladder. Some rungs are higher than others. Back in the 1950s, the CEO of a corporation made maybe 10 or 20 times what the line worker made. Now, it’s more than a thousand times.

Is it because CEOs are working that much harder? No. In fact, economists have crunched the numbers and found zero correlation between CEOs' compensation and how well the corporation they lead is performing. Zero. So don't tell me it's because today's CEOs are so much more brilliant than the CEOs of the past. It's because they got to rig the rules in such a way that they get these huge compensation packages that they didn't get before. And because labor unions have declined, workers have a lot less bargaining power.

A lot of this also has to do with the rising concentration of industry. There's more monopolies than even in 1990. That’s led to higher profits, which go to capital owners and CEOs who are compensated with shares in their corporation. So if profits go up, then their compensation goes up.

Schulte: So, how do we move forward? How do we reclaim the hijacked Protestant work ethic and bring back these more humane ideas about decent work, honoring people’s callings, and shared prosperity?

Anderson: The Protestant work ethic generated what we know of as neoliberalism today, which is just a revival of the old conservative work ethic. But the progressive idea also led to social democracy, which is not known or understood in the United States. It's the system that was most highly developed in the Nordic countries, France, and The Netherlands. A big feature of those countries is leisure. Guaranteed paid vacations. Something Americans are not familiar with. [Laughing.] That is all workers. Universal.

In fact, in Denmark, even the unemployed get a little pot of money so they can go on vacation, in recognition that involuntary unemployment is itself a very depressing state, and they need relief from it. The Netherlands, too, offers this benefit.

Schulte: Wow.

Anderson: You could look at the average per capita income in these social democracies, and it doesn't look that great. On the other hand, if you throw in the fact that you also have universal health insurance, you don't have to make an enormous amount of money just to afford doctors, medicine, and hospitals. They have excellent health care and pay a quarter to a half of what Americans pay for crappier health care. Social democracy has a lot of pluses.

So, at the most general level, I think we should move towards a more social democratic system that’s deeply rooted in the Protestant work ethic, too.

Everyone should look at the report of a commission I participated in called Reimagining The Economy, which was put together by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

When people ask how the economy is doing, they look at things like GDP growth and the stock market. But that doesn't tell us how Americans are doing. We wanted to reconceptualize this and make the goal to ensure that Americans from all walks of life can flourish. I was the only philosopher on the commission. I listened to all these focus groups from all across the country—urban, rural, suburban, all regions of the country, all different walks of life, poor people, middle class, young people, older people. People with health and disability issues, college students, and non-college-educated people.

What I discovered is such a deep commonality in the values and aspirations of Americans.

People are demonizing each other because of what party they belong to or whether they’re urban or rural. This is based on ridiculous stereotypes. What do people want? What are their aspirations? Economically, essentially, everybody wants to work hard to provide for their families and to promote the welfare of their communities. They all want opportunities to move ahead with their lives, build wealth, and not live in constant precarity. It's very important to understand that when you see people with a very narrow time horizon, like they're only thinking about the next day and not planning for retirement, almost invariably, it's because they're living paycheck to paycheck. And their main worry is, “I’ve got to make rent or make the payment on my car or my car insurance, because if I lose my car, I lose my job, and then I'm sunk. Then I get evicted. The problem is that we have an economy such that people are just on the edge. They're in a precarious state where one little shock could send them spiraling down.

So what we're trying to do in the commission's recommendations is to reduce precarity.

• Build a social welfare system that doesn't have benefit cliffs. Right now, if people get a raise, they can suddenly find that they no longer get subsidized health insurance. This is very unfair.
• Antitrust. There is accumulating evidence that increasing monopolization is driving down wages, so set an antitrust agenda.
• Redistribute economic opportunity across geographic areas. It used to be that mid-size cities like, say, Toledo, Ohio, could be pretty good job generators. But over time, the growth of good jobs has been concentrated in a few major metro areas like New York, Washington, DC, Seattle and the Bay area in California. And the problem is, those places are super expensive. Nobody can afford housing there. It’s appalling. That means people can’t move to opportunity because they can’t afford it. So we should build up community development banks so places like West Virginia, which are economically bereft, can get access to credit and rebuild their economies, maybe with green energy.

Schulte: What gives you hope that we’ll move in that direction?

Anderson: What gives me hope is that both parties are now off the neoliberal train, at least rhetorically. That's a major shift. Antitrust is back on the political agenda in a big way. Labor unions are back. Labor unions haven’t been this popular in 60 years. [Editor’s note: An August 2024 Gallup survey showed 70 percent of Americans approve of labor unions, the highest level since 1965.]

People are coming to recognize that their economic fates have much to do with structure and not just their personal virtue. Opening up people's minds to that reality opens people up to policy change.

And then you can start mobilizing voters around a different economic agenda.