#the problem with work

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The institution of the family has, of course, undergone dramatic changes since the period of high Fordism. But just as the work ethic has managed to survive the transformations of work, the ghost of dead family values continues to haunt us as well (Stacey 1996, 49). As one White House report from the 1980s put it, the family, as the "seedbed of economic skills, money, habits, attitudes towards work, and the art of financial independence," plays a key role in the transmission of work skills and ethics; "neither the modern family nor the free enterprise system would long survive without the other" (quoted in Abramovitz 1988, 350-51). The family ethic endures in this post-Fordist period, serving various family-values campaigns as a tool of political-economic discipline arguably for many of the same reasons it was defended earlier: for the role it plays in reproducing a stable and able workforce with little in the way of public funding—or, to put it another way, because otherwise we might "destroy the golden egg that produced cheap labor" (Kessler-Harris 1990, 39).

The Problem With Work by Kathi Weeks, p.64

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Productivist ethics assume that productivity is what defines and refines us, so that when human capacities for speech, intellect, thought, and fabrication are not directed to productive ends, they are reduced to mere idle talk, idle curiosity, idle thoughts, and idle hands, their noninstrumentality a shameful corruption of these human qualities. Even pleasures are described as less worthy when they are judged to be idle. And what might be cause for ethical distaste in the case of the individual can, when compounded into a generalized indiscipline, become a threat to the social order. This fear of free time, whether manifested as idleness or indiscipline, should not be underestimated. If nothing else, it can testify to the ways in which models of both the individual and the collective have been shaped by the mandate to work, and continue to be haunted by what [Daniel T.] Rodgers describes as the 'immense, nervous power' of the contrast between work and laziness.

Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries

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The racialization of the work ethic also played a role in the postindustrial economy by facilitating the acceptance of white-collar work. Indeed, C. Wright Mills notes that, despite the fact that most such work was routinized and unskilled, white-collar workers in the United States could nonetheless claim greater prestige than blue-collar workers on the basis of the whiteness and citizenship status of those in the white-collar occupational niche (1951, 248). Once again, the norm's exclusions based on race, nation and ethnicity fueled its inclusiveness in terms of class. One's status and comportment as a waged worker, as a member of the working or middle class, was not just a matter of asserting one's moral worthiness and social standing as "a worker," but as a white worker, a working man, an American worker, or, to recall an earlier example, a "high-priced man"—that is, via one's relative privilege as a racialized, gendered, national, or classed subject.

These ideals of work continue to receive no small amount of their charge from these marginalizing practices. Regardless of the wages, intrinsic appeal, or status of one's work, it can serve as a means to assert one's moral superiority and thereby legitimate one's economic privilege over a series of racialized and gendered groups. Over the course of US history, there is a continuous calling into question of the work commitments and habits of different immigrant and racialized populations. Whether it was the panic about the inability of US corporations to compete with a more vigorous Japanese work culture or the ongoing debates regarding the supposed inadequacies of the work orientations of "inner city residents," "the underclass," "welfare mothers," or "illegal aliens," the work ethic is a deep discursive reservoir on which to draw for obscure and legitimate processes and logics of racial, gender, and nationalist formations past and present. In particular, as the history of racialized welfare discourse demonstrates, the work ethic continues to serve as a respectable vehicle for what would otherwise be exposed as publicly unacceptable claims about racial difference (see Neubeck and Cazenave 2001).

The Problem With Work by Kathi Weeks, p.62-63

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Although industrialists and their managers struggled to inculcate the work ethic among laborers, its adoption proved to be something of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, managers often succeeded in expanding the reach of the traditional ethic of work; on the other hand, the ethic was not always adopted in the form or with the results they sought. First, the split between means and ends introduces a certain indeterminacy. To function as a disciplinary force, the industrial work ethic is articulated—contrary in some respects to the original Protestant ethic—in terms of earthly goals and tangible rewards. These then serve as ideals around which workers can struggle for reforms—demanding, for example, higher wages ensuring more social mobility, and better, more satisfying work. Second, the process of inculcation through which willing subjects are fashioned does not establish a mimetic relationship between culture and subject; the norm that is internalized is always in some ways altered or hybridized in the process. The battles fought within the discursive frames set by these competing versions of the ethic operate to continually transform their terms. Since the nineteenth century, the working class has developed its own version of the work ethic, and this alternative work ethic from below has been useful to the political projects of contesting the structural exclusions and cultural marginalization of the class[16]. This "laborist work ethic" of the industrial period, one of several dissident versions that we will continue to discuss in the following section, draws on a variant of the labor theory of value to celebrate the worth and dignity of waged work and to contend that such work is entitled to respect and adequate recompense (Tyler 1983, 200). Rather than malign the shiftless poor, for example, this version of the ethic takes aim at the idle rich (199).

The Problem With Work by Kathi Weeks, p.58-9

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The particular limits of Weber's account can be illustrated by returning again briefly to Marx's account of primitive accumulation and Weber's story of early capitalist development. As noted above, each author focuses on a different "vanishing mediator" in the transition to a capitalist society; state violence for Marx, religious doctrine for Weber. Whereas Marx insists that "force is the midwife of every old society which is pregnant with a new one" (1976, 918), Weber claims that it was Puritanism that "stood at the cradle of the modern economic man" (1958, 174). Marx's story of primitive accumulation and Weber's history of the Protestant ethic also end on similar notes. According to Marx, once the capitalist mode of production is in place, the "bloody discipline" deployed to create a class of wage laborers is supplanted by a less direct mode of force, the "silent compulsion of economic relations" (1976, 905, 899). Weber's account concludes with the replacement of the self-discipline of the Puritans by an economic order capable of determining the lives of every individual with "irresistible force"; "the Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so" (1958, 181).

The Problem With Work by Kathi Weeks, p.57

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The impact of the Protestant ethic was comparable to monastic existence insofar as this worldly asceticism sought "methodical control over the whole man (119; emphasis added). It was and remains, in this sense, a biopolitical force, one that renders populations at once productive and governable, increasing their capacities together with their docility. As Foucault once described the production of disciplinary individuality, "discipline increases the forces of the body (in economic terms of utility) and diminishes these same forces (in political terms of obedience)"; it produces "both a productive body and a subjected body" (1979, 138, 26). The individuated subject is both more useful and more manageable; "the individual is not, in other words, power's opposite number; the individual is one of power's first effects" (Foucault 2003, 30).

The Problem With Work by Kathi Weeks, p.54