Is the Work Ethic Going Out of Style?

By Donald M. Morrison

IN the pantheon of virtues that made the U.S. great, none stands higher than the work ethic. As Richard Nixon defined it in a nationwide radio address: "The work ethic holds that labor is good in itself; that a man or woman at work not only makes a contribution to his fellow man but becomes a better person by virtue of the act of working." Lately the President has so often mentioned the work ethic--and so often suggested that it may be endangered--that its veneration and preservation have become something of a campaign issue. The President warns ominously: "We are faced with a choice between the work ethic that built this nation's character--and the new welfare ethic that could cause the American character to weaken."

In Nixon's implied demonology, the man who stands for "the welfare ethic" is George McGovern. Candidate McGovern briefly proposed that, as a substitute for some existing federal assistance programs, the Government give a $1,000 grant to every man, woman and child in the land, whether working or not. Yet McGovern, every bit as compulsive a worker as Nixon, is solidly in favor of the work ethic, saying "I have very little patience with people who somehow feel that it is of no consequence if they do not work." He contends that most people share his dedication to toil, and will work if only given the opportunity.

But will they? Or is the work ethic really in trouble?

There are signs aplenty that the ethic is being challenged, and not just by welfare recipients. In offices and factories, many Americans appear to reject the notion that "labor is good in itself." More and more executives retire while still in their 50s, dropping out of jobs in favor of a life of ease. People who work often take every opportunity to escape. In auto plants, for example, absenteeism has doubled since the early 1960s, to 5% of the work force; on Mondays and Fridays it commonly climbs to 15%. In nearly every industry, employees are increasingly refusing overtime work; union leaders explain that their members now value leisure time more than time-and-a-half.

Beyond that, an increasing number of Americans see no virtue in holding jobs that they consider menial or unpleasant. More and more reject such work--even if they can get no other jobs. Though unemployment is a high 5.5% of the labor force, shortages of taxi drivers, domestic servants, auto mechanics and plumbers exist in many places.

Young adults are particularly choosy; many have little interest in the grinding routine of the assembly line or in automated clerical tasks like operating an addressing machine or processing a payroll. The nation's 22.5 million workers under 30, nursed on television and still showing their Spock marks, may in fact be too educated, too expectant and too anti-authoritarian for many of the jobs that the economy offers them. Affluence, the new rise in hedonism, and the antimaterialistic notions expressed in Charles Reich's The Greening of America have turned many young people against their parents' dedication to work for the sake of success.

More than the youth are uneasy. A Gallup poll of workers of all ages last year showed that 19% were displeased with their jobs, up from 13% in 1969. Observes Psychiatrist Robert Coles: "Working people with whom I have talked make quite clear the ways they feel cornered, trapped, lonely, pushed around at work and confused by a sense of meaninglessness."

These developments should not come as too much of a surprise, considering that only fairly recently in human development has man--or woman--had anything but contempt for work. The Greeks, who relied on slaves for their work, thought that there was more honor in leisure--by which they meant a life of contemplation--than in toil. As Aristotle put it: "All paid employments absorb and degrade the mind." Christianity finally bestowed a measure of dignity on work. Slaves and freemen are all one in Christ Jesus, said St. Paul, adding: "If any one will not work, let him not eat." For the medieval monks, work was a glorification of God; the followers of St. Benedict, the father of Western monasticism, set the tone in their rule: "Laborare est orare"--to work is to pray. During the Reformation, John Calvin asserted that hard-earned material success was a sign of God's predestining grace, thus solidifying the religious significance of work. Around Calvin's time, a new, commerce-enriched middle class rose. Its members challenged the aristocracy's view that leisure was an end in itself and that society was best organized hierarchically. In its place they planted business values, sanctifying the pursuit of wealth through work.

The Puritans were Calvinists, and they brought the work ethic to America. They punished idleness as a serious misdemeanor. They filled their children's ears with copybook maxims about the devil finding work for idle hands and God helping those who help themselves. Successive waves of immigrants took those lessons to heart, and they aimed for what they thought was the ultimate success open to them --middle-class status. They almost deified Horatio Alger's fictional heroes, like Ragged Dick, who struggled up to the middle class by dint of hard work.

During the Great Depression, the work ethic flourished because people faced destitution unless they could find something productive to do. World War II intensified the work ethic under the banner of patriotism. While the boys were on the battlefront, the folks on the home front serenaded Rosie the Riveter; a long day's work was a contribution to the national defense. In sum, the American work ethic is rooted in Puritan piety, immigrant ambition and the success ethic; it has been strengthened by Depression trauma and wartime patriotism.

Not much remains of that proud heritage. Today, in a time of the decline of organized churches, work has lost most of its religious significance. Horatio Alger is camp. Only a minority of workers remember the Depression. Welfare and unemployment benefits have reduced the absolute necessity of working, or at least made idleness less unpleasant.

Automation has given many people the ethic-eroding impression that work may some day be eliminated, that machines will eventually take over society's chores. Says John Kenneth Galbraith: "The greatest prospect we face is to eliminate toil as a required economic institution."

Do all these changes and challenges mean that Americans have lost the work ethic? There is considerable evidence that they have not. After all, more than 90% of all men in the country between the ages of 20 and 54 are either employed or actively seeking work--about the same percentage as 25 years ago. Over the past two decades, the percentage of married women who work has risen from 25% to 42%. Hard-driving executives drive as hard as they ever did. Even welfare recipients embrace the work ethic. In a recent study of 4,000 recipients and non-recipients by Social Psychologist Leonard Goodwin, those on welfare said that, given a chance, they were just as willing to work as those not on welfare.

Despite signs to the contrary, young people retain a strong commitment to work. A survey of college students conducted by the Daniel Yankelovich organization showed that 79% believe that commitment to a career is essential, 75% believe that collecting welfare is immoral for a person who can work, and only 30% would welcome less emphasis in the U.S. on hard work.

What is happening is that the work ethic is undergoing a radical transformation. Workers, particularly younger ones, are taking work more seriously, not less. Many may have abandoned the success ethic of their elders, but they still believe in work. Young and old are willing to invest more effort in their work, but are demanding a bigger payoff in satisfaction. The University of Michigan Survey Research Center asked 1,533 working people to rank various aspects of work in order of importance. "Good pay" came in a distant fifth, behind "interesting work," "enough help and equipment to get the job done," "enough information to do the job," and "enough authority to do the job."

Indeed in labor contract negotiations expected to begin early next summer, the United Auto Workers intend to make a major point of its demand for increased participation by workers in decision-making within plants. "People look at life in different ways than they used to," says Douglas Fraser, a U.A.W. vice president. "Maybe we ought to stop talking about the work ethic and start talking about the life ethic."

The trouble is that this new humanistic, holistic outlook on life is at odds with the content of many jobs today. Most white collar work involves elemental, mind-numbing clerical operations. Factory work is usually dull and repetitive, and too often dirty, noisy, demeaning and dangerous as well. It is a national scandal that last year on-the-job accidents killed 14,200 U.S. workers. In most auto assembly plants, a worker must even get permission from his foreman before he can go to the bathroom. The four-day week offers no real prospect for humanizing work; doing a boring job for four days instead of five is still an empty experience. Charles Reich says: "No person with a strongly developed aesthetic sense, a love of nature, a passion for music, a desire for reflection, or a strongly marked independence could possibly be happy in a factory or white collar job."

A few enlightened employers have concluded that work, not workers, must change. Says Robert Ford, personnel director at American Telephone & Telegraph: "We have run out of dumb people to handle those dumb jobs. So we have to rethink what we're doing." In restructuring work, corporate experimenters have hit on a number of productive and promising ideas. Among them:

Give workers a totality of tasks. In compiling its telephone books, Indiana Bell used to divide 17 separate operations among a staff of women. The company gradually changed, giving each worker her own directory and making her responsible for all 17 tasks, from scheduling to proofreading. Results: work force turnover dropped, and errors, absenteeism and overtime declined.

Break up the assembly line. A potentially revolutionary attempt at change is under way in the Swedish auto industry. Volvo and Saab are taking a number of operations off the assembly line. Some brakes and other sub-assemblies are put together by teams of workers; each performs several operations instead of a single repetitive task. In the U.S., Chrysler has used the work team to set up a conventional engine-assembly line; two foremen were given complete freedom to design the line, hand-pick team members and use whatever tools and equipment they wanted.

Permit employees to organize their own work. Polaroid lets its scientists pursue their own projects and order their own materials without checking with a supervisor; film assembly workers are allowed to run their machines at the pace they think best. AT&T eased supervision of its shareholder correspondents and let them send out letters to complainants over their own signatures, without review by higher-ups. Absenteeism decreased and turnover was practically eliminated. Syntex Corp. allowed two groups of its salesmen to set their own work standards and quotas; sales increased 116% and 20% respectively over groups of salesmen who were not given that freedom.

Let workers see the end product of their efforts. Chrysler has sent employees from supply plants to assembly plants so they can see where their parts fit into the finished product. The company has also put assembly-line workers into inspection jobs for one-week stints. Said one welder: "I see metal damage, missing welds and framing fits that I never would have noticed before."

Let workers set their own hours. In West Germany, some 3,500 firms have adopted "sliding time." In one form of the plan, company doors are open from 7 a.m. until 7 p.m., and factory or office workers can come in any time they like, provided that they are around for "core time," from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., and they put in a 40-hour week. Productivity is up, staff turnover is down, and absenteeism has fallen as much as 20%.

Treat workers like mature, responsible adults. A few firms are attempting to give workers more status and responsibility. In its Topeka, Kans., plant, for example, General Foods has eliminated reserved parking spaces for executives, banished time clocks, made office size dependent not on rank but on need, abandoned the posting of in-plant behavior rules and put the same carpeting in workers' locker rooms as in executives' offices.

The work ethic is alive, though it is not wholly well. It is being changed and reshaped by the new desires and demands of the people. "The potential of the work ethic as a positive force in American industry is extremely great," says Professor Wickham Skinner of the Harvard Business School. "We simply have to remove the roadblocks stopping individuals from gaining satisfaction on the job. The work ethic is just waiting to be refound."

In the new ethic, people will still work to live, but fewer will live only to work. As Albert Camus put it: "Without work all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies." It will be a long while, if ever, before men figure out ways to make the work of, say, a punch-press operator or a file clerk soul-enriching. While waiting for that millennium--which may require entirely new forms of work --bosses who expect loyalty from their employees should try to satisfy their demands for more freedom, more feeling of participation and personal responsibility, and more sense of accomplishment on the job.

. Donald M. Morrison

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