In Sunday’s Times, Lisa Belkin relates the latest poll of workers which found that 40% of workers were excited to return to their jobs on Monday.
Every once in a while I hear from people who love their jobs. I don’t mean people who are merely pleased to have a job, or relieved not to despise that job, but rather workers who are head-over-heels ecstatic about the work they do. People who would keep on working if they hit the lottery. People who jump out of bed in the morning, thrilled that it is Monday.
A study from the Ajilon Office, a division of Ajilon Professional Staffing, found that 40 percent of respondents were excited to begin each new week. That left 60 percent who weren’t quite as thrilled about it, but the minority who love their jobs are a reminder to the rest of the population of what work can ideally be.
She then goes on to talk about the sizable group of work-lovers.
I may have read too much Marx, but my first thought as I scanned this article was, “False consciousness! False consciousness!”
Then I thought about Arlie Hochschild, and thought “Bad home life! Bad home life! Work has become home and home has become work!”
Or is all this a triumph of 21st management techniques? We’re learning how to treat workers better.
Thoughts? Would you keep doing your job if you won the lottery?
Apt. 11d 
Nope. My first thoughts are that in this abysmal job market, some other MLS-holder would need it more than I. I’d ramp up the volunteering to feel useful and to make up for lost workplace socializing.
Moot, though, since I married a lotto employee and thus am barred from even chipping in to the MegaBucks pool at work.
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Yes, I’d keep mine. I enjoy teaching and the contact with colleagues. Writing is also easier when I’ve got other deadlines; the one semester that I didn’t teach (studying for prelims) was too isolating.
but I’d teach fewer sections.
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Not only wouldn’t I keep it if I won the lottery, I’m not going to keep it for the rest of the year: I’m going to become a pastry chef instead.
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First, if I won the lottery, I’d be living off a poor-people tax, so lets get that out of the way at the top!
Basically, winning the lottery wouldn’t make me quit my job, but the Revolution would. By which I mean, I like working (and in fact like my current job a lot) but I never feel like it’s part of a whole that is contributing to better life for humankind. Sure, I’m keeping my beloved family fed and housed, and perhaps helping to keep the employment level a bit higher than it might otherwise be, so that’s not bad at all. And the magic of how it all flows around is always amazing—but it’s also happening within systemic governance which is terrible and getting worse, to put it mildly.
If I have to pay for Humvees, can I get more armor on them? Or can I not pay to have all these people killed? Or to trash our planet in general? I suppose I would find a way to minimize the cash flow from me to the feds, and maximize it in other directions…
(From the Clash’s “Magnificent Seven”:
“Karlo Marx and Fredrich Engels
Came to the checkout at the 7-11
Marx was skint – but he had sense
Engels lent him the necessary pence”)
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I love my job. It has well-defined boundaries in time and responsibility. I work with people who appreciate me for everything I bring to the job rather than restricting me to a set of tasks. I enjoy the mundane physical and mental tasks of my job. I learn a lot about society and human relationships from my job. I am well paid for only having a high school diploma.
However, I wouldn’t continue working if I won the lottery. Even though I get a lot out of my job, I could find those things in other pursuits and relationships if I had enough money to pay my current expenses without working, and the free time that is now devoted to the job (including commute and prep).
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Five years ago, I would have said that nothing would have convinced me to quit my job. That perspective changed. I’d quit my current job in a heartbeat. Love the institution but the work bores me silly. Old job I loved the work but the institution was morally bankrupt.
However, if I ever got a job with the balance of institution and work (similar to the honeymoon phase) I’d stay on forever. But I wouldn’t work in the summer — or teach night classes–ever again.
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If it was a good enough lottery to compensate for my salary, I’d drop my job and give the opportunity to some poor schmuck with a Ph.D., looking for a job. . . .
But I love my job in no small part because it’s something else to think about besides laundry and the like!
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I would still do my job – and I know my husband would definitely do his job. I enjoy my job. He’s downright evangelical about his.
But we’d definitely do less of it. Right now, I work 3 days/week and he works 5. With the right lottery winnings, I’d whittle that down to 2.5 days for me.
And we’d certainly need to negotiate up to 12 weeks vacation. (Needn’t be paid: the lottery winnings would take care of that.)
So bottom line: we both love our jobs and look forward to going to work. We are treated well and fairly at our respective employers. They are both flexible with regards to our “married with young children” current lifestyle and encourage part-time work/flex-time/working from home. They don’t care when we get there or when we leave or if we take a day off to go to a field trip. As long as the work gets done, our schedule is our own to manage.
So, we do a lot of work after the kids go to bed. Not perfect…but for now, it is working for us.
We also live in the Midwest. We moved here from the east coast and I’ve noticed a decidedly different attitude about work/family balance here.
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I think that this post could be rewrtten as a good final question in an Introduction to Political Theory class. “40% of Americans love to go to their jobs. What would Karl Marx say about that?” Students could go in several different directions on that. They could say “Marx would say that those 40% are the bourgoise and they are getting better at exploiting the proles. No wonder they’re happy.” Or they could go on about trade unionism.
I just asked my husband who works for an investment bank if he would keep his job if he won megamillions. He said no. His job isn’t a passion, but a necessity.
Like Kristen, I would like to work at a job part time. Marx said that after the revolution, everyone would work doing a variety of activities part time. A plumber in the morning and a poet in the afternoon. I was always thought that Marx got that right.
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Hell yes!
I would probably work at some point. But my intial guess is that I would quit for awhile and spend time with my family, travel, indulge in hobbies. I wouldn’t think that would be interesting for long, and I would look for more structure, and a way to make a contribution to the larger community. I would probably work on education or adoption related issues.
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Work has Become Home; Home life has Become Work
The blog 11D cites (and offers interesting comment) a NY Times article which states that a recent poll found that 40% of the respondents were excited to return to work on Mondays. Are today’s workers more or less satisfied with
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I would quit my job. Even though I love my job, there are a million things I want to do outside my job. I’d like to be home with the kids, write, read, just generally be.
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Glad to see you’re willing to sign up for the revolution, Laura! And I think I may poach your suggested question for an exam sometime.
Would I keep my job? Yes. I wouldn’t stress about feeding my family so much, and that would allow my job’s benefits to outshine its drawbacks, or at least so I hope.
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I’d keep my job… if I have a job when that lottery win rolls around!
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I’d keep my job and based upon the amount, I would try and buy a substantial share of company stock.
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Ancarett: right on!
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As Hochschild points out in her books, there are both push and pull factors at work. Some employers do indeed make jobs attractive, though hardly all, and lots of aspects of home life seem less attractive to men and women than they used to.
I’ve drop the residual Marxism, however. “False consciousness” is just a fancy way of saying that those dunderheads who don’t agree with me must be duped by the capitalist pigs. It’s no more a “scientific” concept than anything else in Marxist-Leninist theory. Workers (even those who respond to polls like that) deserve more respect than Marx gave them.
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Since I’m actually in the midst of considering a career change (I’m a software engineer), I definitely would not keep the job, although I imagine I would probably still do some programming in the open-source movement or on personal projects or something.
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I really disagree with Dennis about false consciousness. It is one of Marx’s great insights. Nowadays we think of it in terms of adaptive and accomodative preference and belief formation and maintenance. Scientific? I’m not sure it’s been rendered as scientific as Marx would have liked, but it is a valuable concept. From the fact that it is often used the way Dennis describes it does not follow that there’s anything wrong with it.
And Marx himself wrote with great nuance and respect about matters like false consciousness and opiates of the masses etc. Not that anyone reads him now, and not that anyone cares.
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The decline of the Soviet Union was quite a blow for the old chap. It is too bad that nobody reads Marx anymore. His scientific stuff doesn’t work anymore, but his critique of capitalism is still really good.
60% of America’s workers hate their jobs. They need someone to tell them why they are unhappy. They need someone to say that there is something profoundly immoral about our system. They need someone on their side. If you skip over all the historical materialism stuff, Marx still works.
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I wouldn’t keep my job, mostly because I know there are people out there who would need it more than I would.
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“60% of America’s workers hate their jobs. They need someone to tell them why they are unhappy. They need someone to say that there is something profoundly immoral about our system.”
60% of America’s workers don’t hate their jobs because our system is immoral. 60% of America’s workers hate their jobs because there’s an awful lot of hard, boring, or otherwise unpleasant work that has to be done to keep civilization running, and the people doing it aren’t going to be all that happy doing it no matter what system we have.
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OK, maybe immorality was a strong word. How about capitalism leads to many injustices.
But don’t listen to me. I spent two hours on the phone with lame-brain school administrators yesterday. Since then, I have been ranting about how they’re going to have their heads on a plate when the system gets privatized, and the union can no longer protect their skinny, lazy asses.
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I’d quit — if the lottery winnings were big enough to cover not only cost of living but health insurance.
My job’s about the security, and the computer access, and not a heck of a lot more, even though I like most of my co-workers well enough.
It’s boring, not bad.
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