by Chris Hughes
That was 20 years ago, and I can’t remember a thing he said when he finally stood at the podium. I do, however, remember his fellow salesmen, the managers in suits and ties, and the warehouse workers encircling him afterward, smiling broadly and laughing as they shook his hand and hugged him. He was the center of attention, and his community had come out to support him. For one hour of one afternoon, at the very end of his career, he got to be small-town royalty.
My father had always been a charmer. At work he was everyone’s confidant, their trusted advisor, informal therapist, and professional ally. He was the first to know when a secretary was pregnant, if a boss was cheating on his wife, or if a customer had lost a loved one. He didn’t collect his intel from gossip but from quiet confidences shared in office hallways. People knew they could trust him.
My dad’s customers, the people who bought the industrial paper he was selling, were some of his closest friends. He took care of them by listening to their stories, celebrating their successes, and comforting them in the worst of times. They took care of him in return. When he was 50, an inner ear condition caused him to become completely deaf in one ear. Before his eardrum was removed, he would suffer debilitating attacks of dizziness, nausea, and vertigo that came on without warning. On multiple occasions, his customers literally caught him as he fell and watched over him until he recovered or my mother arrived to take him home.
The professional community my dad built might have been stronger than most, but the relationships we cultivate in our workplaces are often sources of deep fulfillment. The Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, who chronicled the erosion of civic and political engagement over the second half of the twentieth century in his book Bowling Alone, believes that the one source of enduring community in many Americans’ lives is around the watercooler at work. “Professionals and blue collar workers alike are putting in long hours together, eating lunch and dinner together, traveling together, arriving early, and staying late,” he writes. “People are divorcing more often, marrying later (if at all), and living alone in unprecedented numbers. Work is where the heart is, then, for so many solitary souls.”
Every second Wednesday, my father’s sales route required him to spend a night away so he could visit his customers in small, sleepy towns in the western Carolinas with names like Shelby, Cherryville, and Gaffney. On summer Wednesdays, my mom and I, both out of school and with time to spare, would pile into his blue Oldsmobile and join him. Those nights away from home were a welcome break for me, an excuse to do something out of the ordinary. I had to sit in the stifling heat of the car while my dad made his sales calls, but then I got to play in the pool at the Fairfield Inn in the evening and get snacks and sodas from the vending machine—paradise for an eight-year-old.
On one trip, it was too hot to wait in the car, so I accompanied my father into a small, industrial building somewhere in rural South Carolina. The room smelled of ink and musk, and fans circulated the dusty, stale air. I had a Game Boy in hand, but I was really listening to my dad’s conversation with the customer, who was in his fifties and balding. He spoke with an unusually thick accent, making it difficult for me to understand everything he said. My dad and he exchanged seemingly endless lighthearted banter. Then, at the end of their conversation, they got serious while they pored over a white binder with my dad’s company logo on top. A moment later, we ducked outside, and I remember feeling a cool breeze on my face. My happy anticipation of the AC of the car now in sight paled in comparison to how elated my father was. He swung my hand in his, laughing as we walked back to the car. He had made a big sale, and his joy was infectious.
I have no doubt that some of his happiness that day came from the financial reward it would bring him, but even then I knew that it wasn’t just about the money. I could feel that my father had achieved something unexpected, something he felt he deserved, and he was relishing the sense of accomplishment. Still today, he can talk enthusiastically about the weights of industrial paper sizes, the kinds of paper that work on certain printers, and the variety of colors to choose from. He enjoyed the challenge of his work as least as much as the relationships he was able to build along the way.
While not every day was fantastic, and there were many setbacks and tense evenings at home, my father wanted to work. The same goes for my mother, who loved her job teaching. She retired a few years earlier than most people do, just shy of her sixtieth birthday. In her final years at the small high school where she taught math, she had grown increasingly beleaguered with the nonteaching duties the school required of her. School administrators expected her to be hall monitor, bus line supervisor, and occasional public safety officer in her own classroom, as well as a talented instructor of algebra, geometry, and precalculus. But she loved what she did, because she knew that every now and then, she shaped the trajectory of one of her students’ lives. Some became teachers themselves; still others, engineers or architects. Even after retiring, she volunteered to tutor students who were struggling.
Once when I was nine or ten, a 20-something woman awkwardly approached our table at a “fish camp”—shorthand for a cheap, Southern seafood restaurant where the featured items on the menu are popcorn shrimp, fried flounder, and coleslaw. “Mrs. Hughes!” she said as she sidled up next to us. “I just wanted to let you know how much of a difference you made in my life. I never got a chance to tell you that, and I am just so grateful.” My mom tilted her head to the side and gave a warm, toothy smile, nodding in appreciation and thanks. They chatted briefly, and a moment after the woman left, my mom turned back to my father and me and said sheepishly, “I have never seen that woman before in my life.” She wasn’t forgetful or insincere—it was just that she had taught thousands and thousands of students over the years. Even she couldn’t keep track of the impact she had.
Most people in America, at least in this regard, are a lot like my parents. I’ve talked with historians, economists, scholars, cashiers, and gig economy workers about how technology is changing work and what people believe is core to who Americans are. There is one thing that both elite and ordinary people, on the left and the right, tend to agree on: people are better off when they work. They of course need to work to be able to afford the basics of a roof over their heads, food on the table, an education for their kids, and to see a doctor when they are sick. But people also want to work because it gives their lives meaning, community, and purpose. Every person deserves to feel a sense of reward from their work, just as much as they deserve a sense of financial security in their lives.
Normally, those who advocate for a guaranteed income do not talk a lot about work. If they do, many tend to see a guaranteed income as a way to prepare for a world without work, or at least a time when there will be a lot less of it. But I believe work is essential to who we are and who we want to be. Work that is rewarding and meaningful—including traditionally unpaid work like caregiving and getting an education—makes us happier, healthier, and more fulfilled. We know this intuitively, but psychological studies also show that people who work are happier, are healthier, and even live longer. By contrast, people who lack paid employment for long periods of time have a much higher rate of falling into depression, exhibiting symptoms like irritability, difficulty concentrating and making decisions, and insomnia. The unemployed also report higher rates of feeling like they are a disappointment to their families or to themselves. Having a new job can reverse those feelings over time, but it takes longer to recover from depression than it does to fall into it. The pain that comes from joblessness can be deep, enduring, and stubbornly persistent.
The stress and depression that accompany unemployment can have a very real and concrete impact on our bodies and even cause us to die earlier. Anne Case and Angus Deaton’s recent shocking studies have drawn attention to the rising death rates among white Americans without high school degrees, some of the people who have been the most affected by changes in the labor market. Case a
nd Deaton’s work connects these “deaths of despair,” as they call them, to the cumulative disadvantages that follow from low employment.
Higher rates of substance abuse and suicide are at fault for many of the negative health effects and early deaths that are correlated with unemployment. Unemployed people are more prone to alcohol and drug abuse and the kind of psychological struggles that lead people to early death by suicide. Someone who is unemployed is more than twice as likely to use illegal drugs than someone who is employed full time. The correlation between unemployment rates and opioid abuse in particular is staggering: for every 1 percent increase in the unemployment rate in a given county, the opioid death rate rises by nearly 4 percent, and emergency room visits rise by 7 percent.
While it is true that work seems to keep us healthier, sometimes we can take our obsession with work too far. Political leaders glorify the “dignity of work” and claim work of any sort is better than no work at all. Donald Trump and Joe Biden compete to see who can speak more for “Scranton values,” grounding their arguments in the idea that even demeaning jobs are better than no jobs. Civil rights activists have historically voiced similar ideas. Martin Luther King Jr., in his speeches about labor, celebrated the dignity of work. “If a man is called to be a street sweeper,” he said in 1967, “he should sweep streets even as a Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, ‘Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.’. . . No work is insignificant. All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.”
Even the smallest contributions to society are worthwhile, but it is also true that we should want more meaningful work that can’t just be done by a machine. The problem with the glorification of the dignity of work is that it flattens the idea of work itself and makes no distinction between purposeful work, busywork, and work to destructive ends. Some work is meaningful and rewarding, and other work sheer drudgery. Some work is directed toward destructive ends—drug dealers and insider traders have strong work ethics, too. When we imbue the dignity of work with a kind of religious meaning, it obscures the fact that the kind of work we want more of is the kind that is purpose-driven and fulfilling: positive, substantive work that earns esteem.
Unfortunately, a lot of work in America today is draining and tedious. Retail and service sector jobs, the fastest-growing category of jobs in America, can involve standing over a fast-food cash register or deep fryer for hours on end. Backbreaking construction jobs require workers to toil outdoors in all seasons, including in the depths of winter. Home and office cleaning jobs are some of the least rewarding and most physically punishing jobs out there, not to mention the lots of coal miners or slaughterhouse workers. While even bad jobs provide a sense of purpose to some, many are stuck in them because they are the only options they have to pay the bills.
The “dignity of work” phrase is often co-opted and used as a cynical tool, especially by people on the political right, to force people out of social welfare programs. Frances Fox Piven and Bruce Cloward documented in their landmark history Regulating the Poor the myriad ways that government has used arbitrary rules to inspect people’s homes, to ban them from having color televisions, or to force women to answer extremely personal questions. An early version of welfare, called Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), may have seemed generous in spirit, but was invasive in practice. “AFDC mothers, for example, are often forced to answer questions about their sexual behavior (‘When did you last menstruate?’), open their closets to inspection (‘Whose pants are those?’), and permit their children to be interrogated (‘Do any men visit your mother?’),” Piven and Cloward wrote. “Unannounced raids, usually after midnight and without benefit of warrant, in which a recipient’s home is searched for signs of ‘immoral’ activities, have also been part of life on AFDC.” Work requirements follow in a long tradition of similar kinds of regulations organized to regulate the lives of the poor rather than actually encourage any kind of meaningful, rewarding work.
This continues today. For example, Arkansas’ governor, Asa Hutchinson, has aggressively implemented work requirements across every major social safety net program in his state in order to reduce the number of people who qualify. He has kicked tens of thousands of people off of food stamps by proclaiming that if you can’t find a job that employs you for 20 hours a week in Arkansas, you no longer qualify for any kind of nutritional assistance. (Even in a period of low unemployment, there are still tens of thousands of Arkansans who find themselves temporarily jobless in any given month, often through no fault of their own.) Several states are looking to follow suit, and Republicans are considering implementing a similar kind of requirement nationally. As if that’s not enough, Hutchinson has requested a waiver from the federal government to implement the same policy for the 240,000 residents of his state who are too poor to afford health care and rely on Medicaid when they have emergencies. In the periods of life when they don’t have a job, they will have no access to affordable health insurance. In Arkansas, “work requirements” is code for a strategy to make the lives of poor people more difficult.
Enforcement of these work requirements plays into dangerous racial stereotypes about who is benefiting from government assistance. The infamous “welfare queens” invoked by Ronald Reagan are a mythological figure in American consciousness with deep roots in racist stereotypes. The dignity of work is often used to invoke imagery of white men on assembly lines, demonstrating determination and resilience to provide for their families, in implied contrast to images of black women who passively rely on government handouts. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, labor force participation rates are higher for single black mothers (76 percent) than for white men (72 percent). And that doesn’t even take into account any nontraditional work like caregiving that many women do.
The malicious ways work requirements have been used in the past make me suspicious of some calls on the left for a federal job guarantee in lieu of a guaranteed income. Its basic premise is that the tens of millions of people who aren’t participating in the formal workforce can only be guaranteed economic security if they sign up for newly created, but still undefined, government jobs. One of the most concrete plans put forward by journalist Jeff Spross imagines that municipal government employees will hunt out local infrastructure projects and ask churches and civic organizations to submit ideas for new jobs. “People seeking jobs would come to these local offices, which would draw on the federal databases to link the potential workers up with the most appropriate projects,” he writes. “Crucially, workers would be matched with nearby jobs according to skills they already have.” The cost would be significantly higher than a guaranteed income, up to $775 billion a year for 14 million new government employees.
There is little evidence that such a job guarantee program would work. A 2015 study by prominent economists ranked the effectiveness of 200 examples of labor market interventions. They found that subsidized public-sector employment programs consistently came in last, sometimes even having negative impacts. The arguments for a federal job guarantee require faith in government’s ability to connect people to jobs they want and need. The idea of relying on a DMV-like federal jobs database to help local nonprofits and churches match 14 million people up with new jobs seems far-fetched at best. Government can and already does provide good public service jobs to lots of people—nearly 15 percent of the American workforce is already employed by federal, state, or local governments. But relying on a job guarantee to provide broad economic stability is a step too far. It falls squarely in the tradition of government telling poor and middle-class people what to do with their lives, dictating what counts as a real job and what doesn’t.
What we need instead is a social policy that provides people with opportunities to find the kinds of fulfill
ing work they want and deserve. The best way to guarantee that is to empower people with cash to secure extra training, pay for childcare, or move to a place with more opportunities. As we will see later, evidence from existing American programs shows that a little bit of cash doesn’t cause people to drop out of the workforce, but instead helps them find work. If people have financial stability from a guaranteed income, they can choose work that’s fulfilling, purpose-driven, and a match for their skills.
Today, a Walmart worker who suffers from harassment in the workplace or extreme scheduling demands receives no unemployment insurance if she quits. With a guaranteed income in the background, she wouldn’t be able to drop out of the workforce altogether, but she would have a small cushion to help make ends meet for a few months while she looked for a new job. (Because her tax return showed she worked last year, she’d receive the guaranteed income for the entirety of this year.) That kind of security would also allow her to turn down a dead-end job, even if it paid a little more than one that might grow into something better in time.
For some people, the most fulfilling and rewarding work may not be paid at all. This uncompensated work plays an important role in our society, and we should recognize it as the real work it is. In our modern technical language, people are said to be working only if they have formal paid employment from a legally recognized business entity: they receive W-4 or 1099 forms, their salaries are regulated by minimum wage laws, and their productivity is counted as a part of economic statistics like GDP.
But historically, these lines were not so brightly drawn. On the farm my grandfather grew up on, everyone was expected to pitch in to grow crops, keep house, and take care of one another. We wouldn’t recognize much of this activity today as work, even though it clearly was. Our current definition of work is a relatively recent invention that emerged as people moved off family farms and into employment relationships that could be codified and made visible to the state. Work became narrowly defined—and tended to line up with the activities of white men.