By Connor Harney
“We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, we must justify our right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
- Richard Buckminster Fuller
It has been a little over a week since President Trump deemed my co-workers at Whole Foods and I critical infrastructure during the global Coronavirus pandemic, and already, any sense of appreciation that title conferred—both in being categorized as essential in combating COVID-19 and better everyday treatment by customers—has already dissipated. In the place of that gratitude, our customers seem as entitled as ever toward the labor we thanklessly provide. At the same time, any supply-chain issue or corporate-rationing policy out of our control means we face their ire, rather than the faceless executives and middle management responsible.
Taking aside that this global outbreak has everyone on edge, this sort of behavior is not at all surprising given the highly-stratified nature of class in the United States. There is a massive gulf in wealth, even among those that work. That is, the pay differential between say a software engineer and grocery stocker like myself is immense: the stock clerk can expect a median pay of just over 12 dollars an hour and the software developer, on the other hand, can expect just under $58. Even the lowest paid developer makes twice that of the clerk. Of course, none of this takes into account benefits connected to employment in the U.S. like healthcare and retirement, which widens this gap even further.
As Zizek wrote recently, “the impossible has happened, our world has stopped,” and yet, as we are expected to provide a sense of normalcy for the rest of country during what can only be described as a breakdown of all norms, workers in the service sector still struggle for basic human dignity. It was only after public shaming that my company offered paid sick leave, and only for the extent of the pandemic. Even our hazard pay is laughable, two dollars more an hour to put ourselves and our families on the front lines of this biological battle.
Given that, it has been nearly a decade since Fight for $15 began their campaign to raise wages and unionize typically-unorganized workers. And as the minimum still sits at under eight dollars, it should come as no surprise that conceptions of the nature of the work constitute a major dividing line among American workers. As a society, we fetishize technology, and its presence looms large over our national consciousness. For that reason, those who work in that sector of the economy find themselves held in high esteem by the public.
Unfortunately, this reverence is almost always accompanied by a zero-sum view, whereas only certain workers deserve dignity. Just like the literal wealth of the nation, there is only so much goodwill to go around—low-skilled workers, or the ones that make sure that everyone is clothed, fed, and sheltered, are barred from pride in their work that those in other sectors are allowed. This belief in the lowly nature of the service worker is by no means a new one.
Dolores Dante, a waitress interviewed by Studs Terkel in the early-1970s for his famous book Working, speaks to this long-standing state of affairs when she described her response to those who would say she was “just a waitress.” According to Dolores, “people imagine a waitress couldn’t possibly think or have any kind of aspiration other than to serve food,” but for her the job fulfilled a sense of purpose to the point that: “I don’t feel lowly at all. I myself feel sure. I don’t want to change the job. I love it.”
As human beings, we need to engage with the material world for our survival. Under capitalism, the way we meet our material needs is determined by factors like where we live, our level of education, skills we have, jobs available on the labor market, as well as the social networks we are a part of. All of these things set the stage for where and how we work. That a game of chance governs our career trajectories should highlight how arbitrary the barriers to respectability we create are: the Dolores Dantes of the world should find dignity in their work.
However, the strongly-held belief in the connection between “skill” and compensation remains an obstacle to a world where such self-worth for service workers is publicly embraced. In many ways, this problem comes out of the notion of the United States as reaching a new level of economic development—a concept that would not have been foreign to our waitress. During the 1970s, manufacturing began to shift from the core to the periphery of the capitalist world system, and what are often called the service and knowledge economies emerged as the dominant growth sectors. With a certain optimism, Daniel Bell and other thinkers responded to these changes by predicting the coming of the Post-industrial society.
Under these new social arrangements, making things no longer mattered. That the U.S. could provide the bare necessities of life was a foregone conclusion. The focus of the new economy would be on ideas and technical know-how. What this view did not consider is that, rather than a transcendence of industrial society in one country, it represented more its international universalization. This was at least Harry Braverman’s response to the idea of Post-industrial society. In Labor and Monopoly Capital, released in the same year as Bell’s book, he argues that the theory is just another in a long line of “economic theories which assigned the most productive role to the particular form of labor that was most important or growing most rapidly at the time.”
Most importantly, rather than a decline in Taylorism or scientific management in the world of work, the rise of the service economy symbolized its universal application. He describes the segmentation of work similar to that used on an assembly line as “a revolution…now being prepared which will make of retail workers, by and large, something closer to factory operatives than anyone had ever imagined possible.” Not only was American society still reliant on that manufacture of commodities, other workplaces were beginning to look more like the shop floor.
Even so, the link between knowledge and the so-called new economy placed a certain import on those with higher levels of education—as it was often assumed the technology used in the growth sectors of the American economy required more formal learning. Such a view still prevails, but considering the level of technology that has been integrated into our daily lives and the abundance of people with advanced degrees working behind Starbucks counters and driving for Uber, it should be left in the past along with the myth of the post-industrial society the current pandemic has clearly laid bare.
Instead, we should use the current crisis to break down barriers between working people—highlighting the work of all that keeps our economy in motion. Moving past these antiquated notions, we can come together to forge new social bonds to fight for an economy that works for the working class and not just the rich.
