Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Al Gini is a member of the Department of Philosophy and the Institute of Human Resources and Industrial Relations at Loyola University Chicago. He is co-founder and Associate Editor of the journal Business EthicsQuarterly, Senior Consultant for the Ethical Leadership Group, and a regular commentator on Chicago's NPR affiliate, WBEZ.

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Why do we work? And why do we work so obsessively? Al Gini observes that work rules, runs, and sometimes ruins our lives. But what is intriguing is that in spite of this, many of us come to love, or at least need, that which holds us captive. In this provocative, lively, and sometimes disturbing meditation, Gini reveals that work is not only a fundamental aspect of our humanity, but also a profound reflection of our deepest selves. Peppered with real voices from workers and employers across America, and with references from psychology, history, popular literature and economics, My Job, My Self speaks to every employed person who has yet to understand the costs and challenges of a lifetime of labor.

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My Job, My Self

Brunner-Routledge

Chapter One

You Are What You Do

Career and identity are inextricably bound up, indeed they are almost equivalent.

?Douglas LaBier

                      In the last scene of Arthur Miller's Deathof a Salesman, Willy Loman's family and friends are standing at his graveside,saying their goodbyes, and reflecting on the character and legacy ofthe deceased. Willy, they suggest, was a dreamer, a schemer, a talker andteller of tall tales, a con man constantly searching for the big score. Butfor all of his big talk and even bigger dreams, both his mouth and hisideas were too large for his talents and abilities. Willy, they say, was afailure. But even worse, he was the kind of failure who could neveradmit it, either to himself or to others. And so right up to the end, Willywent on dreaming and scheming and hoping for that one big sale tocome along and set him up for life.

    Only one of those gathered at Willy's grave defends him. "Nobody... blame this man," he says. "You don't understand: Willy was asalesman.... A salesman has got to dream.... It comes with the territory."It was Willy's job to smile, talk a lot, glad-hand one and all, sayshis defender. His job was to sell himself, sell his dream and his ideas, sellhis product. It was his job that made him what he was.

    The saying "it comes with the territory," from Miller's play, is nowpart of the lexicon. It conveys an acceptance of all the parts of a job andof doing whatever you must in order to get the job done. Perhaps WillyLoman was a failure and a fool because he didn't recognize that he hadneither the temperament nor the talent for his chosen profession, butbeing a salesman shaped him; it drew out the best and the worst in himand made him what he was. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, first wechoose and shape our work, and then it shapes us?forever.

    Whether we have a good job or a bad one, whether we love it or hateit, succeed in it or fail, work is at the center of our lives and influenceswho we are and all that we do. Where we live, how well we live, whomwe see socially, what and where we consume and purchase, how we educateour children?all of these are determined by the way in which weearn a living.

    But work is not just about earning a livelihood. It is not just aboutgetting paid, about gainful employment. Nor is it only about the use ofone's mind and body to accomplish a specific task or project. Work isalso one of the most significant contributing factors to one's inner lifeand development. Beyond mere survival, we create ourselves in ourwork. In his classic article "Work and the Self," Everett C. Hughesargued that work is fundamental to the development of personality. Becausework preoccupies our lives and is the central focus of our time andenergies, it not only provides us with an income, it literally names us,identifies us, to both ourselves and others. Hughes was convinced thateven when we are dissatisfied with or dislike the work that we do, choiceof occupation irrevocably "labels" us, and that we cannot understand aperson unless we understand his or her work and how he or she dealswith it.

    In the long run work can prove a boon or a burden, creative or crippling,a means to personal happiness or a prescription for despair. But nomatter where we might wind up on this spectrum, where we work, howwe work, what we do at work, and the general climate and culture of theworkplace indelibly mark us for life. Work is the means by which weform our character and complete ourselves as persons. We literally createourselves in our work. To restate the old Italian proverb tu sei quello chemangi (you are what you eat), in regard to work: tu sei quello che fai (youare the work you do). Work is a necessary and defining activity in the developmentof the adult personality.

    According to theologian Gregory Baum, "Labor is the axis of humanself-making." We both establish and recognize ourselves in our work.Work allows us to find out what we can do and cannot do, how we areseen by others and how we see ourselves. In work we discover ourboundaries and limits as well as our capacities for success. Work is theyardstick by which we measure ourselves against others. It is the meansby which we establish our rank, role, and function within a community.Work not only conditions our lives; it is the necessary condition for life.Men have always known this, and have accepted it as part of their lot. Asone forty-five-year-old machinist put it, "Being a man means being willingto put all your waking hours into working to support your family. Ifyou ask for [too much] time off, or if you turn down overtime, it meansyou're lazy or you're a wimp." As more and more women have enteredthe workplace, they too have been forced to confront this fundamentaltruth of adult existence: Not having a job means you're a person withoutsalary, stuff, or status.

    Assuredly other factors enter into the equation of self-identity; forexample, genetic inheritance, race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation,religious training, and family background. But even with all of these,work remains an irreducible given, the most common experience ofadult life. The lessons we learn at work help formulate who we becomeand what we value as individuals and as a society. Whatever the conditionsof our labor, work shapes us and, unfortunately, often malforms us.But, for good or ill, work makes us human because we make somethingof ourselves through work, and in so doing we recognize ourselves andothers in the task of working. And yet, as E. F. Schumacher has indicated,despite the centrality of work in human life, the question?"Whatdoes the work do to the worker?" is seldom asked. Workers andscholars alike regularly debate the benefits as well as the drawbacks ofparticular jobs in specific industries, but only rarely do they address theoverall impact of work on the psyche and character of the worker.

The core of Karl Marx's writings is his critique of capitalism as an economicsystem and his attack on bourgeois society as an unjust socialstructure. For Marx, capitalism engenders the consolidation of capital,the concentration of power, the continuous manipulation of the marketand merchandizing, the perpetuation of poverty, and the reification ofsociety into the disproportional dominance of the "haves" over the "have-nots."A significant part of Marx's critique that is sometimes overlookedis his analysis of the specific effects of work on the character and identityof the individual worker, as is Marx's conviction that work is the primarymeans by which we become persons. Marx argued that the factory systemalienated or disassociated workers from their work and consequentlystripped work of personal meaning and purpose. He maintained thatmechanized "conditions of production" (industrialization) denied workersresponsibility and creativity. According to his analysis, capital investment,machinery, the industrial process, and the product became moreimportant than people. The owners and managers of industry looked onworkers not as subjects, but as objects, or as just another material factorin the production process. For Marx, when workers are regarded asobjects and treated accordingly, they begin to think of themselves as objects.They lose, or perhaps never gain, the sense that they are meant tobe subjects.

    In his earliest writings, "The German Ideology," Marx defined the individualas a worker:

As individuals express their life, so they are. What [individuals] ... are ... coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production.

    For Marx, how people work and what they produce at work necessarilyaffect how and what they think, as well as their personal sense of self,freedom, and independence. Both the process and the product of ourlabor help us to know who and what we are. The process of work bothforms and informs us; we acquire self-definition and self-recognitionthrough labor. In Marx's view, we need work in order to finish and refineour natures, and in work we create our individual identities as well asour collective history.

    A somewhat unexpected but nevertheless important counterpart toMarx's overall thesis on work is Pope John Paul II's 1981 encyclical "LaboremExercens" (On human work). According to John Paul, althoughwork maybe part of humanity's banishment and punishment, it is alsopart of a person's definition and directive in the world. According to theencyclical, the human world is not a simple given or a fixed thing. It is,rather, a "fact" continuously being produced by human labor. Work, theencyclical claims, is a good thing in the sense that it is useful and somethingto enjoy. It is good because it expresses and expands our dignity.Through work, one not only transforms nature, adapting it to his or herown needs, but one also achieves fulfillment as a human being and in asense becomes "more a human being." Work is literally the "mark ofman," the footprints of humanity on the sands of time.

   In Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud wrote that thecommunal life of human beings has a twofold foundation: "the compulsionto work ... and the power of love...." For Freud, Eros (love)and Ananke (necessity) are the true parents of civilization. Eros bonds ustogether and makes us unwilling to forgo our objects of sexual pleasureand happiness, while ananke compels us to toil at tasks that help us tomaintain and guarantee self and community. According to Freud, bothlove and work cooperate in the achievement of "better control over theexternal world and ... a further extension of the number of people includedin the community." At the very least, work gives one "a secureplace in the human community."

    Work also helps establish the regularity of life, its basic cycles of day,week, month, and year. Without work, days and time patterns becomeconfused. Further, work organizes, routinizes, and structures our lives.It provides a safe outlet for our competitive strivings and often helpsto keep us sane. More than this, as the German philosopher MartinHeidegger stated, "You are your projects." Using philosophical terms,Heidegger implies that through projects (work) and their continuationinto the future, a person establishes and acknowledges his or her "being"in the world. Heidegger suggests that you are what you do. Identity islargely a function of determined action or productive achievement. Weare known by others and we know and define ourselves primarily by theprojects we devise, by the products we create, and by the occupations wehold. A person who cannot point to an achievement does not and cannotfeel like a full person. Subjective experience is simply too diffuse forself-identity. "I feel" is not as definitive as "I did." Nothing else in ourlives can give us the sense of objective identity that work can.

    Director Elia Kazan said that the one absolute lesson he has learned inlife is that "a man is what he does," and, consequently, that the secret toa good life is to make a living at what you want to do. As sociologistDouglas La Bier asserted, careers and identities are inextricably tied up;indeed, they are equivalent. People are what they do, and what peopledo affects every aspect of who they are. The lessons we learn in our workand at the workplace become the metaphors we apply to life and themeans by which we digest the world. The meter and measure of workserves as our mapping device to explain and order the geography of life.We are "typed" by our work and, in turn, we analyze and evaluate theworld and others by our acquired work "types." Our work circumscribeswhat we know, how we know it, and how we select and categorize thethings we choose to see, react to, or respond to. Work influences our useof language, our values and priority structures, our political awareness,and our repertoire of personal and professional learned skills and behaviors.As Samuel Butler wrote, "Every man's work, whether it be literatureor music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portraitof himself." Journalist and ethnographer Connie Fletcher, in her bestseller,What Cops Know, dramatically drives home this point:

Cops know things you and I don't. It's knowledge crafted out of years spent on the street, sizing up and dealing with the volatile, cunning, confused, comic, tragic, often goofy behavior of human beings from every social, economic, and mental level, and it's knowledge won as a by-product of investigating criminal specialities such as homicide, sex crimes, property crimes, and narcotics. A cop who works traffic has peered deeper into the recesses of the human psyche than most shrinks. A cop who works homicide, or sex crimes, will tell you things Dostoyevsky only guessed at.

    Although different kinds of work affect different people differently,every person's "self-portrait" is both directly and indirectly influenced bythe work that he or she does. Some of our job-acquired characteristicsand behavioral patterns are substantial and life altering, and others areminor and relatively benign in their nature and impact. Following are afew idiosyncrasies of specific "portrait types" that may not hold up toclose scrutiny, but, nevertheless, have a certain anecdotal currency thatwe can all recognize.

    Nurses and doctors have a notorious reputation for being bad patientsand even worse diagnosticians of loved ones and family members. Theyoften immediately envision the worst-case scenario for every malady.The flip side of this example would be emergency room practitionerswho witness so much trauma and gore that they are often insensitive toand seemingly uncaring or underconcerned about the more commonmaladies and injuries of everyday life.

    Many teachers and especially college professors have acquired thewell-deserved reputation of being utterly unable to offer a direct answerto a direct question. William James called this phenomenon the "Ph.D.syndrome"?the need to cite and document everything ever said on thetopic under discussion. Although the ability to explain, analyze, offerexamples, and disprove antecedents are all necessary elements of the craftof teaching and scholarship, too much of an answer can deaden the curiosityand interest of even the brightest of students.

    Accountants and librarians share a reputation for being excessivelydetail-oriented and having a compulsion for organization that borderson being anal retentive. For both professions, order, exactness, and accuracyare the core virtues for high job performance. Unfortunately, thesecharacteristics, when too zealously applied, can prove counterproductivein both professional and personal spheres.

    It is said of psychiatrists and psychologists that their work lives are oftenso abstract, so cerebral, and deal so much with abnormality that theyoften lose the ability to be spontaneous and nonanalytical with individualswho are not their clients. This stereotype is perhaps best captured inthe old chestnut about the two professors of psychology who happen topass each other in the hall on the way to their offices. As they pass, onesays, "Good morning!" The other responds, "How are you?" And as eachis entering his respective office, he is thinking, "Hmm ... I wonderwhat he really meant by that?"

    Finally, there is the profile that is sometimes associated with thosewho earn their living by the sweat and strain of their hands and bodies.Tradespeople, artisans, and construction laborers are workers whose jobsrequire specific intellectual and technical skills as well as physical ability.Strength, dexterity, and endurance are requisites of the job, and thesetypes of workers often measure themselves and others in terms of theirraw physical prowess. (This profile is, of course, commonly assumed tobe one of the reasons that women are not represented proportionally inthese fields.) For many of these workers their reputation on the job andtheir personal sense of who they are is directly connected to theirdemonstration of physical prowess. These are blue-collar folks who takepride in their toughness and think themselves physically and morallysuperior to those whose work does not require them to wear steel-toedboots.

    Recently, I attended a family wedding and the first person I saw wasmy Uncle Frank. "Hey, college kid," he said to me as he shook my handin a vicelike grip and peppered my shoulder with a series of heavy blows."How you been?" Uncle Frank is in his mid-seventies but his punchesstill hurt, as did his annoying habit of calling me "college kid." I had justturned fifty-three. "Uncle Frank," I said, massaging my shoulder, "youlook great. Where did you get the tan? Have you been playing a lot ofgolf?" "Naw," he said, "you know I hate golf. I had a couple of jobs thismonth." "Jobs? But you've been retired for ten years!" "Yeah, but theywere easy jobs," said Uncle Frank. "A couple of driveways, some concretesteps, a few sidewalks. It was a piece of cake." "Uncle Frank," I said, "thisdoesn't make sense. Is something wrong? Do you need money"? "No!No!" said Uncle Frank. "It's nothing like that." "Then why?" I persisted."Why did you take these jobs?" He smiled, grabbed me roughly anddrew me to him. "Because," he said with a wink, "I wanted to see if Icould still do it, college kid. Capice? I just wanted to see if I could stilldo it."

Samuel Butler's notion that "every man's work ... is always a portrait ofhimself" is a part of what psychiatrists and psychologists refer to as "egoboundaries," by which they mean the clear perspectives that well-balancedpeople have on the limits and outlines of their identities. Theypossess a clear sense of integrity and continuity, and do not suffer from"boundary diffusion." For most of us the primary source of ego boundariesis our work. In work we come both to know ourselves and to orientourselves to the external world. Work establishes a "coherent web of expectations"of the rhythm, direction, and definition of our lives, whichallows us to feel contained within precise outlines: "I'm a doctor" versus"I'm a cardiovascular surgeon"; "I'm a lawyer" versus "I'm a litigator inmy firm's antitrust division"; "I'm in advertising" versus "I'm the artisticdirector for Leo Burnett"; "I'm an educator" versus "I'm a professor ofphysics at MIT"; "I'm a carpenter" versus "I'm a cabinetmaker." Themore precise and descriptive we can be about ourselves, the greater oursense of self-definition. Nothing is so uniquely personal, so active a representationof individuals as their skills and works. According to sociologistRobert Kahn in his study Work and Health, occupation andidentity are closely intertwined:

When people ask that most self-identifying of questions?Who am I??they answer in terms of their occupation: toolmaker, press operator, typist, doctor, construction worker, teacher. Even people who are not working identify themselves by their former work or their present wish for it, describing themselves as retired or unemployed. And work that is not paid lacks significance, much as we might wish it otherwise. Many people who are usefully occupied, but not paid, respond to questions in ways that deprecate both their activities and themselves. A woman who takes care of a home and several small children and is engaged in a wide range of community activities may answer with that tired and inaccurate phrase, "just a housewife." A retired man equally busy with an assortment of projects, is likely to say, "Oh, I'm retired; I don't do anything.

    Psychiatrist Leonard Fagin believes that our personalities are intimatelybound up with our work. Work is our calling card to the rest ofthe world. Men and women alike use their work to identify themselvesto others. Picture yourself silently circulating at a cocktail party andeavesdropping on how people introduce themselves to one another. Iguarantee that you are not going to hear anything like the following:"Hi, I'm Bob, and I'm an Episcopalian"; "Hello, I'm Patty. I'm active inthe Democratic Party"; "Good evening, I'm Peter and I'm the proud fatherof three kids"; "Howdy, I'm Susan, and I support Habitat forHumanity." It just doesn't happen that way. Workers describe themselvesfirst by "name, rank, and serial number," that is, by name, occupation,and title. It is only later, if at all, that they might divulge what they like,what they value, and how their lives are structured outside of work. Becauseof their traditional role as breadwinners, men may be especiallytied to this form of identity.

    Robert Bly, poet and founder of the "men's movement," maintainsthat most men are more obsessed with work than any other thing intheir lives. Having a job is a man's primary job, suggests Bly. It is the onecultural imperative men cannot shirk if they are to have any status in thehuman community and especially in the enclave of men. Sadly, even iftheir work is joyless, or uninteresting and leaves them no time to be withtheir families, men will still talk passionately about it, because it establishesboth their basic sense of masculinity and their specific status in the"pecking order" of other males. Like it or not, Bly concludes, men havebeen conditioned to believe that the baseline of their masculinity is determinedby the work that they do.

    Perhaps the easiest way to prove the point that we (men and womenalike) are all affected, labeled, and formed by the work we do is to considerits converse. Imagine the now too common scenario of a forty-eight-year-oldemployee who has been "reengineered," "downsized," or"five-plus-fived" out of a job. With the anchor of adulthood rippedaway, with few prospects in sight, but with bills to be paid, mortgages tobe met, and children to be educated, the "terminatee" is often reduced toadolescent torpor, and is forced to ask the questions: Who am I now?What have I accomplished? What can I do? Who will I become? JosephEpstein calls being out of work "the surest path to self-loathing." Peopleout of work, said Rollo May, "quickly become strangers to themselves."And without work, Albert Camus said, "all life goes rotten."

    Part of the "psychopathology" of work, says Leonard Fagin, are thepersonality and behavioral disorders that can occur when a person loseshis or her job. Fagin argues that unemployment can constitute a severemental and emotional crisis. If work influences identity formation, thecontinuity of self, time orientation, and interpersonal relationships, thesudden loss of work, conversely, disorients or disassociates our sense ofself, time, and space, and our connections to and relationships with others.If work is our calling card, then when it is withdrawn, for whateverreasons, that loss affects how we see ourselves and the world, and how werelate to others. Work, Fagin argues, not only identifies us, but it alsoidentifies what we are not, and thus determines all of our role boundaries,and group and class identities. Unemployment changes both thequality and clarity of our private interpersonal relationships and our socialand professional network of relationships as well. To be deniedwork is to be denied far more than the things that work can buy. It is tobe denied a basic and primary organizing principle in life?the ability todefine and respect ourselves as persons. The relationship betweenwork, self-identity, and mental health is nicely summarized by historianElliot Jacques:

Working for a living is one of the basic activities in a man's life. By forcing him to come to grips with his environment, with his livelihood at stake, it confronts him with the actuality of his personal capacity?to exercise judgement, to achieve concrete and specific results. It gives him a continuous account of his correspondence, between outside reality and the inner perception of that reality, as well as an account of the accuracy of his appraisal of himself.... In short, a man's work does not satisfy his material needs alone. In a very deep sense, it gives him a measure of his sanity.

    E. F. Schumacher believes that work is part of the "university of life."Life is a school, a training ground, and in work we become somethingmore than what we are. We need work, we are formed by work, and thequality of our lives is directly dependent on the quality of the work wedo. Mirroring Schumacher, philosopher Adina Schwartz maintainsthat mental health requires work. In theory, Schwartz argues, it is atwork that people learn skills, practice and perfect a craft, rationallychoose actions to suit their goals, take responsibility for their decisions,and learn and grow from observing the consequences of their choices. Inframing, adjusting, pursuing, and accomplishing their work tasks, individualsgrow in initiative, intelligence, and autonomy. Individuals arethen able to translate these learned work skills to other dimensions oftheir life. For Schwartz there is a direct relationship between the qualityof life on the job and off it. The mix of the substantive complexity of thejob, individual innate intelligence and talent, and the degree of discretionand freedom allowed in work have a direct bearing on who we areand who we will become both as workers and in our private lives.

    The effects of work on our lives and personalities are both immediateand long-term. Analogous to psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton's understandingof "delayed stress" or "post-stress syndrome among soldiers who haveengaged in combat," many of the lessons we learn on a particular job remainwith us forever, consciously or subconsciously, as part of our catalogof learned experiences. Some of these experiences, according toLifton, inform us and direct us positively, and some can haunt us andhave a negative impact years later. Every job creates its own experiences,its own standards, its own pace, and its own self-contained weltanschaung(worldview). Every job, depending on the intensity, depth, and durationof the individual's involvement, leaves its mark. Lifton asserts that nosoldier walks away from combat untouched by the experience. The samecan be said of most jobs, even those far less traumatic than soldiering.

As stated in this book's preface, adults need work for the same reasonthat children need play?in order to fulfill themselves as persons. Unfortunatelythis thesis applies even to those of us who spend our lives laboringat "bad jobs," jobs that Studs Terkel refers to as "too small for ourspirit" and "not big enough" for us as people. These jobs are devoid ofprestige, are physically exhausting or mindlessly repetitive, demeaning,degrading, and trivial in nature. Even these kinds of jobs, however?thoughwe are often loath to admit it?provide us with a handle onreality, access to services and goods, and a badge of identity. Self-proclaimedphilosopher for the proletariat Bob Black agrees that occupationand identity are inextricably linked. "You are what you do," saidBlack. The problem is, "if you do boring, stupid, monotonous work,chances are you'll end up boring, stupid, and monotonous."

    Because work looms so large in our lives I believe that most of usdon't reflect on its significance. Work is, well ... work, a necessary activitythat is required to sustain and justify the hours between sleeping,eating, and attempting to enjoy ourselves. However, work cannot be easilyseparated from the rest of our lives. The point is, according to neuropsychologistWalter Tubbs, if we are not satisfied with our work, if itdoes not give us what we want and need, then?even if this discontentdoesn't spill over into our social and family lives?we are, at the veryleast, unhappy in well over half of our daily existence. In the words ofThomas Aquinas, "There can be no joy of life without joy of work." Perhapsbecause we live in a society that values the fruits of our labor andnot the labor itself, we have forgotten or never really appreciated the factthat the business of work is not simply to produce goods, but also tohelp produce people.

    René Descartes was wrong. It isn't Cogito, ergo sum (I think, thereforeI am), but rather Labora, ergo sum (I work, therefore I am). We needwork, and as adults we find identity in and are identified by the work wedo. Our work tells us who we are. If this is true, then we must be verycareful about what we choose to do for a living, for what we do is whatwe become. At its worst, work is a burden and a necessity. At its best,work can be an act of personal freedom and self-realization. But eitherway, work is a necessary and defining ingredient in our lives.

Continues...

Excerpted from My Job, My Selfby Al Gini Copyright © 2001 by Al Gini. Excerpted by permission.
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