Reclaiming Democracy and Worker Power

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Today, we're bringing back a conversation that feels more relevant than when we first aired it. It's with the philosopher Elizabeth Anderson about work, morality, and The strange hold the Protestant work ethic has on American life That has always had on American life. And the episode really takes ideas that we all think we understand, hard work, personal responsibility, earning your keep, that kind of thing and shows how these concepts have always been contested And if you think about what's happening right now in the labor market, burnouts layoffs, all the upheaval caused by AI. This conversation is going to matter even more down the road All of which is to say this is a terrific Timly episode about both the present and the future of work hope you enjoyed If you're American When you hear the phrase work ethic You probably think of some imaginary worker who puts her job above everything else who doesn't complain does what she's told. You think, in other words, of the perfect employee That is certainly one version of the work ethic. And it's a story that serves employers much more than it serves employees. But is that the only version of the work ethic Or to put it more directly, is it the best version of the work ethic I'm Seaan Elling, and this is the Gay area Today's guest is Elizabeth Anderson. She's a professor of public philosophy at the University of Michigan, and for my money, one of our very best political and ethical thinkers. She has a new book out called Hijacked, How Neoliberalism turned the work ethic against workers and how workers can take it back It's an ambitious and wide ranging book just as important It is not a morally neutral book Anderson tells the history of something we're all familiar with, at least vaguely Protestant work ethic gave rise to dueling interpretations One of those interpretations was pro workker, and the other was not And unfortunately, the anti worker version is the one that dominates our society today. But she makes the case that it didn't have to be that way. The work ethic was from the very beginning, a contested ideal And knowing the history of the work ethic and how it's been turned against workers is essential if we want to reclaim it today Elizabeth Anderson Welcome to the Gay arerea It's a great pleasure to talk with you I mean, you're a bit of a political philosophy rock star. So I'm glad you're finally here. That may not be the coolest kind of rock star, but it is on this show. So it's long overdue Glad you're here. I'm so happy to be here The Protestant work ethic is a phrase. I'm sure almost everyone knows, but I don't think most people, and I count myself among them can explain it simply or clearly So I'm going to see if you can. And so I'll just ask, Where does this phrase come from And who did it? come from. The phrase the Protestant work ethic comes from the great social theorist Maxs Weber. who wrote a book called The Protestant Ethhic in the Spirit of Capitalism He set the basic terms for our understanding of the work ethic on his description Protestant work ethic was an ethic of nose to the grindstone for the workers for the maximum profit of the capitalist So it's a pretty dreary ethic. And he himself, despite his profession of value neutrality and social science, condemned the work ethic as consigning us to an iron cage. And he contrasted the Puritan attitude towards work as a calling that they wanted to work at in contrast with the capitalist version of the work ethic. where we are forced to work in our calling How important is a Protestant park of the Protestant work ethic. Is the religious foundation essential Absolutely. This is coming right out of the Puritans. The Puritans in England were basically Calvinist in theology and obsessed getting certainty about their salvation. Theologically, the Calvinists think we're all doomed from the start except for a tiny number of people who are saved The critical issue then is you're all desperate to know whether you're saved hopefully to know that you're saved And the Puritan said the only way to tell is if you are working really, really hard because that shows that God has graced you and that you really have faith Puritans We're not trying to promote capitalism. I mean, their concerns weren't even economic, right? It was just purely Theological. I want to make a little amendment about that. Go for it. Weber certainly described their motivation as purely theological. It's all about gaining assurance of one's salvation However In my reading of these work ethic theologians, they were actually quite concerned with the way we conducted our lives in this world They were very shrewd business ethicists They really cared about Wers getting a decent deal making sure that work was respected. No matter how menial it was, making sure that workers had fair and living wages that they weren't being exploited by monopolists or userrs are all kinds of shady characters And They admonished not just the working poor. the idle rich those lazy aristocrats lying around in their states expecting other people to work for them. There's so much history in this book. We obviously can't unpack all of it But I do want to spotlight the industrial Revolution because it is such an important part of the story. And as you say in the book, there were Contradictions built into the work ethic right from the start you call them the repressive and uplifting dimensions. And these dimensions get teased apart during the Iustrial Revolution. And out of that comes the conservative and progressive work ethics Tell me about these competing work ethics and really what happened here. Ply most of us know the Puritans as the biggest killjoys in European history Right? They banned the celebration of Christmas You're not supposed to have any fun. You're supposed to be full of sobriety and self denial and frregality. And they definitely thought that you should be working crazy hard. needed to rest, you know, you have the Sabbath, but then you have to go straight back to work And they instrumentalized rest, right? The purpose of rest is to restore yourself so you can get back to work The important thing is is they thought that workers would reap some rewards from all of this self denial Right, you get to save up You'll be able to buy property, you'll get wealthier, you can afford some conveniences. No luxury, okay, but at least you'll have a more comfortable life And that was because the model workers in the seventeenth century when the work ethic was perfected, both had capital and engaged in manual labor The master craftsman who owned his own shop Even merchant saillors were entitled to a share of the profits of the commercial voyage We don't have a sharp distinction between manual workers and capitalists in the seventeenth century The critical issue in the Industrial Revolution is then you get a very sharp split betweenet wage laborers whose only source of income is the wage they get from their employer on the one hand. And capitalists on the other hand whose entire income comes from profit or interest or some kind of income flow from ownership of an asset It's such an important point and I We have these dueling versions of the work ethic, but they're not equally valid in the sense that one of them is a logical extension of the original work ethic, as conceived by the Puritans. And one of them is a portrayal of it This is the hijacking you're talking about, correct? Absolutely The version that we received that ended up being neoliberalism as we know it today, is the version that Max Fabber described and condemned That's the version that I claim was hijacked by the capitalists and turned against the workers There's another separate tradition of the work ethic, which is consistent because they kept to the class neutrality of the rights and duties of the work ethic The whole idea was Yeah, you work really hard and then you're entitled to reap the fruits of your labor. And that means you need decent pay, a living wage, right You're entitled to have improving prospects if you fulfill the demands of the work ethic Now what was happening, especially in the first half of the Industrial Revolution is that becausecause now you have a sharp division between capitalists and workers ers are working harder than ever under more grueling and dangerous conditions And their wages stagnate all the way through the mid nineteenth century, they're basically flat. Meanwhile, the capitalists are reaping all the gains of the Iustrial Revolution. So their income is growing by leaps and bounds, even though they're actually not doing much. They're just like investing assets. There's a lot of passive income there. So you see a kind of betrayal of the idea that working hard is going to andable you to improve your life whatever he was wrong about. I always believe that Marx was basically right that the ruling class engineers an ideology that justifies their role. And boy, the Iustrial Revolution really does help him make this. his case. Oh, absolutely more of my conversation with Elizabeth Anderson after Quickbreak When I scraped my car in the parking garage, I was worried it could be a long process to take care of it L like a landscaper's first day trimming a hedgem I have definitely already been here Now is it left, right or right left? mayaybe I'll cut a path out and find my way back later. But it wasn't like that. I filed a claim in under two minutes on the GaIiko app and they handled it from there. It was taken care of almost as quickly as it happened. It feels good to get help, Qick. It feels good to Gaio. Support for the show comes from the Guardian. Trying to locate news sources that reliably separate fact from fiction can feel like looking for a needle in the proverbial haystack. Social media feeds, cable news, and subscription based news outlets might be able to give you one version of the news, but not in the way that you need. 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Start celebrating with low prices guaranteed at the Home Depot. Prices may vary by stor excusions of pricey Home Depot com priceash for details Okay, Elizabeth, the rich have always wanted to work for them. Yes. That is as old as civilization. So what is the real innovation with the conservative work ethic? Is it that we get an ideology that basically morally justifies exploitation To an extent, but it's a particular kind of exploitation that's quite extreme So by the late eighteenth century We see conservative thinkers Notably Edmund Burke and Malice, people like this who are in an absolute panic The rising radicalism property list workers. Many of them are inspired by the French Revolution seventeen eighty nine They're out in the streets, they're trying to protest and demand that their voices be heard.. Yeah Eactly. And also the welfare roles are growing And conservatives are in a complete panic over this Malfus had this idea that it must be because of population increase. those Lazy workers are having too many kids that they can't afford to feed. because they will not restrain their sexual impulses. And many of us might recall similar ideas being promulgated in all the controversies about welfare reform in the United States. Never mind that there's never any empirical evidence for this When did wealth become a sign of virtue and poverty become a sign of vice? Do we have the conservative work ethic to thank for that nugget Yes, we do. but you can see a little bit of that even in the Puritans. Yeah. So the Puritans are always desperately looking for signs, right They're saved. And they often took Wealth. as a proxy for how hard you were working and how Frugally you were saving your income By the Industrial Revolution, of course there's virtually nothing to that idea. The owner of the factory Sunters in there makes a couple of decisions and comes home with massive profits And then down the bureaucratic ranks of the factory, the clerk is working harder Fory workers working even harder and the hardest working of all is the poor agricultural day laborer I thought a lot about ideologies, the stories we tell ourselves and how they work and why they're so useful and why they can be so dangerous. And you wrote something in the book that summed up my thoughts better than I ever have. And if you don't mind I just want to read this brief passage to you Is that okay? Yeah Ideologies map our social world in ways that promote particular pasts around it and discourage or blind us to others They mark people occupying different social positions as more or less credible trustworthy or suspect. They inform our emotions, habits, social norms, and practices often in ways that cannot be fully rationalized by the beliefs and values we consciously endorse Now I wanted to read that passage aloud because it does set up the stakes here, right? These ideologies, these stories, they're more than just stories in our head, right? They have a material impact on how we see the world on who we see and who we ignore They really, really matter in the most tangible way sible A lot of what I'm writing about is, especially in the United States, which is neoliberalism on steroids here culture is deeply imbued with the hijacked version of the work ethic, the capitalist version And so there's unbelievable contempt and suspicion of the poor. The overwhelming majority of Republicans think people who maybe are getting food stamps or some kind of public assistance are lazy and life is easy for them. It's like they're just living on a hammock. Anyone who's actually been poor knows that it's in fact a lot of work to be poor, just getting the daily subsistence And you know, often they're keeping down three part time jobs. They can't get full time hours anywhere And it's enormously difficult just to pay for basic necessities That's not the image that many Americans have because we're deeply imbued with the work ethic, suspicion of the poor, contempt for the poor But in fact, what social scientists have been telling us Really ever since the rise of social science is that a lot of poverty is structural has anything to do with the virtues and vices of individuals. It's already built into the system We're talking about all this history. These are very old ideas, but many of the assumptions baked into the way we think about politics and economics today are rooted in the legacies of This work ethic or these work ethics, we have all these models and metrics interested in returns and growth and efficiency But they're all so inhuman, right? Like the well being of workers, the dignity of human beings really just isn't part of these sorts of models. and that's a consequence of these ideas, whether we Know it or not Oh, absolutely. So If you look, for instance B and our ideological representations of them, which are set in economic theory They're the very models of efficiency They never waste anything. They're constantly looking for productive efficiencies, but they also never lead an opportunity to make profits on the table, right? You're always seeking more, more, more If you go back to the pyrs in the seventeenth century, that's how they said business people ought to be and affect everyone to be that way. Always look for another dollar if you can find an opportunity to make it. So in fact, businessmen today just are modern cururitans You've mentioned the word neoliberalism two or three times now. That's a scary word, a boogeyman word at this point But that's basically what you're talking about, correct That is correct. Neoliberalism just is the late twentieth century and early twenty first century revival of the conservative work ethic. Really all the patterns of thinking were already set in the late eighteenth century, and we just keep repeating them. And it all comes back to a series of policy rationalizations for all kinds of policies that redistribute income fromr workers property owners to the holders of assets And that's what neoliberalism amounts to. It's just a whole bunch of policies that secure an increasing share of income for the holders of capital assets I'm wondering why you think neoliberalism won when it did. I mean, we have this long period of post war social democracy in America. And then in the late seventies, early eighties, depending on who you ask, that sort of gives way to the era of neoliberalism, the era we're still living in. todayoday. whyy did it win at that particular moment in history The late seventies were a period of stagflation. You know, we had the Vietnam War Rising distrust in institutions. sounds familiar. And the society was ripe, I think, for a critique of heavy handed government There was actually excessive regulation, I have to say That's a legacy of the New Deal And so Society was ripe for a critique of many aspects of the New Dal regime that was still dominant in the nineteen seventies But it's also the case that A lot of business people themselves hated the New Dal from the start, never liked it always resented it Businesses though, had won a great victory, the taft Hartley Lw, which undermined labor unions They had to spend a couple of decades steadily chipping away at the power of unions in order to essentially redistribute income from unionized workers to profits U And you know, by the mid seventies they had already undermined unions quite a lot Reagan gets elected in nineteen eighty and one of his most famous acts was to fire all of the striking air traffic controllers. That was a deliberate signal he was sending to corporations that they should be equally tough and break unions and employ very aggressive methods. and that really, I think got the ball rolling even faster. You know, neoliberals and market fanatics in general want you to believe that their model liberates ordinary people from government power You make the case in the book, and I think you're absolutely right, the reality is that we still have government. It's just government by capital interest. Now that's great if you're part of the capitalist class, but if you're an ordinary worker This is not the orgy of freedom You were promised. You're not freeing yourself from hierarchical power. You've just changed it from one entity to Another The difference being one of those is accountable to democratic checks and the other isn't Yes, that's I think that's exactly right And look, I mean, you can see this ideology absolutely explicit in the Tch Bros in Silicon Valley. And someome of them even are running corporations like Neta, for instance Zuckerberg holds a majority of all the voting shares. Right. So nobody can unsee him. It doesn't matter, you know, what mistakes he makes. He has permanent control. The board has no power really I mean, that just expresses a desire for authoritarian rule And then they propagated an ideology, like we're going to develop this fantastic technology that's going to make everyone's lives dramatically better. And it would be awful if government were ever to stop the headline rush into the future because we're the heroes of this story And nothing should get in our way I mean, you and I are both, I think we're more or less aligned and our basic political values and commitments are aligned enough But I should ask if you do see any wisdom in the conservative work ethic But you see anything true and important in that tradition of thought Well, the tradition, of course, I'm extracting some different lessons from it I do think the Puritans themselves were actually pretty good business ethicists And they made a very strong distinction between predatory and extractive business models and business models that actually add value. And right, it's only the latter businesses that actually make profits only by helping other people. What imagine that. Like I think that actually offers a positive path So Ethhical Bes. That'd be a great thing If all businesses foollowed the Puritans so on those lightes. And I also I never disparage hard work I'm a creature of a work ethic myself and I'm working all the time But of course, I'm very advantaged. I'm super privileged in having an unbelievably interesting job where I can exercise enormous amounts of autonomy at work I'm trusted to do a good job. I'm not being micromanaged I can build wonderful relationships with my students which are highly rewarding. So I yeah, Tenured professors at research universities are about the best off wage workers there could be in terms of meaningful work And so yeah, I think We ought to be working hard On the other hand, the typical ordinary worker who has a boring alienating job that's deskilled and gets now respect. They're the people who I worry about and I'm not going to ask them to put in all kinds of hard work and expect very little out of it other than their existence I think certainly for me, maybe one of the more insidious consequences of the work ethic is that we get this shift away from a more leisurely and comfortable attitude toward life toward a more materialist philosophy, where the point of life becomes to just acquire as much money as possible which is great for a capitalist society built on endless consumption But I don't think it's so great if you think human flourishing requires More than that Oh, I agree completely. You know, you go to some of the social democracies Nordic countries, you don't need all this stuff. You don't need gigantic homes and gigantic cars to be happy. The fans have figured it out, right? They have really good lives And in fact, what I argue is the either side of the work eth think pro worker work ethic led to social democracy. If anything makes social democracy distinctive from anything we see in the United States, it's the existence of universal guuaranteed paid vacations Social Democrats said, no, the purpose of life is not to work so hard to accumulate money so that you can buy all this stuff and show it off and compete with your neighbors about how you have better stuff than they do It's totally opposed to conspicuous consumption as an ideal of life Instead, they said You should be able to take your leisure Take your pleasures. Enjoy yourself. Ttally cast off the asceticism of the Puritans But of course, you know, the other side, the neoliberal side also cast off the asceticism of the puritisans, but in the name of conspicuous consumption. rather than leisure with friends and family Do you think it would just be better if our livelihoods and our status and sense of self worth and all that weren't anchored to our jobs. I think that Americans probably excessively identify themselves with their jobs, but I don't think it's necessarily bad thing to do that. I think it depends on what the content of your job is. M professional stoop identify with their jobs because They're doing meaningful work, Well, that's primary source of satisfaction. But that's part of the problem, though, right? I mean, to borrow a phrase from David Graber, right? I mean, we have all these bullshit jobs. Absolutely. The nature of the work we do matters a ton. If we were all working jobs that we truly enjoyed, well, that would be different. But that's not the case. Yes. And in fact, you know, even the professional managerial class has its difficulties. You might have come across this Washington Post article, which was disgustsing who are the happiest workers in America It's the lumberjacks, the farmers and the fishers Professionals are actually way down there podcast is doing I don't think they were listed It Is that good or bad? I don't know. But you probably have a good life, don't you? work life Oh, it's Yes is a short answer. But I've gone through this evolution in my own professional life where I think at one point I really thought I could make a difference and the way I was going to do that was through my work and that was central to my identity. But I don't think I feel that way anymore. And don't get me wrong, it really is a privilege to do this. and I hope some people find it valuable. and occasionally, people write to me and say that it is and that makes my day every single time What I'm trying to say is my own thinking was maybe colored by the work ethic in ways I didn't realize. and it's not that I can't enjoy or take pride in my work. It's more that I think it's just Wiser and healthier to think of work as work. And in my case, being a good dad, a good husband, a good friend, that's the real stuff. That's what life is about I think we need a work ethic that celebrates that kind of balance, and we don't have that now. Yes, so work life balance certainly is very, very, very important. And notably The Puritans recognized the raising of children as an important form of work hell yeah, because it is 'causeuse work just is Disciplined activity that helps other people. whether it's paid or not They they care about discipline, but you know, you have to get up every day to take care of your kids. You know what I mean? There's you know We gott to feed them, those regular activities here, not all of them are fun. A lot of them are fun, but not all of them. Nevertheless, we can reap the rewards of Meaningfulness when you see your kids grow and mature become adults And the point about wage work or paid work is that you can Also benefits human beings on a wider scale beyond the scope of the family. So, you know, I don't know how big your audience is for the gray area But you're bringing ideas and thoughtfulness to a significant number of people who really enjoy your show, including me Yes, the show is it is a gift to humanity. That's how that's how I like to think of it. No, it is actually. You should you should really, you know, I mean, it's very thought provoking. I genuinely appreciate that more of my conversation with Elizabeth Anderson after one last break All Lulu Lemmon's new drop of Daily essentials feels like a deep breath of fresh air. Breezzly is a collection of drapey, pants, shorts, and tanks designed to mix a notch with your wardrobe as the weather warms up It's all made in our lightweight stretchy swift fabric Throw on these everyday staples after practice and bring an airy feel to your daily moves. Shop the Breezzly colloection now at Lululeemon. com I want the whole world to know about that thing So you use a thing called Canva make it an even bigger and better thing whether you want to create flyers for that thing presentations for that thing, or design merch for that thing So people can see your thing, feel your thing e thing we know, it's a thing. Canva, the thing that makes anything a thing. Hey everybody, It's Megan. I am bringing a Touch moreore the Beautiful game live to New York City. and I want to see you there july seventeenth, I'm sitting down with a very special guest for live taping right in the middle of the World Cup. Doors are gonna open at six thirty and we're gonna keep the party going with a little reception after. comeome watch us do the thing live in Manhattan, presented by Norwegian Cruise line. grab your tickets at boxmedia d. com slash Megan Again, grab your tickets at booxmedia. com slash Megan Cub li taaping y' you and I agree that a majority of people would be happier if they had more work life balance if the basic conditions of survival weren't to these precarious things we call jobs So Why the hell Can't we get this world here? What's the biggest obstacle in our country to building this kind of society, a society that I think majority of people if you really drill down prefer so why can't we it I think it's because we're still locked into the logic of the conservative work ethic So people think that the amount of money they make is a measure of their virtue and in particular, especially how hard they work and how much they save. And so they don't want to see People who they think of as lazier or more imprudence getting lifted up by means that have nothing to do with their own personal efforts. becausea the thought is,, there must be something wrong with them. How come they're not as well off as me, right And they resent paying taxes too because they know how hard they worked for that money And in contrast with the lazy landj Lords back in the day Now the rich actually do work harder. I mean, not necessarily productively. They could be very extractive and exploitative work, but They are putting a lot of time in the office. Even the people who are winning are not really winning. I think that's right. I think a lot of them, they're kind of driven to it. Part of it is due to the structure of esteem in society It's like people to look down on you if you're not working like crazy and accumulating a lot of stuff. and able to show it off, that pressure of esteem and contempt I think drives a lot of people, including the people at the very tippy top of our work system. What do you think is the most immediate thing we could do to empower workers so that do have more genuine freedom in their lives Is it as simple as just more unions or is it more complicated than that? Well, I do think unions would definitely help I think paid vacations work. s C determination, which I mentioned, workers actually having a say at work, but also importantly making necessities more available to people without having that be tied to work. That's critical. What do you mean? In all the social democracies, access to health care It's not contingent on your having a job And you don't have to pay a lot for it. The prices are way more reasonable than they are in the United States So I think some kind of public provision there and also In the social democracies, you don't have to pay for college. You know, you have a rich public university system And, you know, your tuition' paid for. And places like Denmark and Germany, you eighteen year olds even get nd for going to college. So they're not even financially dependent on their parents while they're not working by just going to school You know, we have the rise of gig work and remote work and that really does seem to cut against progress here, right? Because everything we're talking about is infinitely more difficult to do If you can't organize and mobilize and in a very atomized society where people are cut off from each other in the ways that they are That's very difficult to do And that seems to be there's not the biggest obstacle, certainly. One of them, wouldn't you say? Yes, that's right. And also just the sheer fragmentation of the workplace But of course you can change the rules of organization too I mean, that's just a artifact of our labor law that workers have to organize each Starbucks separately from each other. Like you don't have to do that. You could let all the workers vote, you know, all the employees of Starbucks vote together. And you could do that for any franchise as well. Like why not let all the workers at McDonalds vote on a labor union Your professorship is actually named after the great John Dewy. Yeah. And I love that because It fits. Oh, I got to choose the name. Oh, you did I'm the John Dewey distinguished university professor and every university professor gets to choose a previous scholar who once taught at the university as their named. So why was he your guy? Why'd you pick him? Oh Because, you know, I'm a Deweian pragmatist through and through. What does that mean for people who aren't Dey lovers in the way that we are Pragmatism is the view that We figure out how to live better. through experiments in living And the key site of figuring that out is democracy. That's how we figure out how to live together in better ways But we have to approach this all in a very experimental spirit. But we've talked about Dewey on the show. We had Cornell West on last year You know, like Dewey, you seem to embrace the necessity to experiment. and evolve and democracy is the site of that experimentation. And if it isn't, we end up with an unfree and undignified society, which is what we have, in my opinion rightight now. Yeah. I think that's right. And The increasing inequality that comes from neoliberal policies. where you have Almost all economic growth going to the top one to ten percent for decades now. It creates a lot of resentment, increasing distrust and political polarization and makes democracy harder because people are hating each other now. L look, I know you're not politician, you're not a political consultant But part of what makes your work as a philosopher so valuable is how connected it is to the real world. And in that spirit, I think I want to get you out of here by asking How would you sell this vision to the public if it was your job. to sell this vision to the public. And by this vision, I basically just mean the progressive work ethic as you've to find it in this conversation One thing I want to point out is that we are putting up with a lot of predatory and exploitative behaviors of the top one to ten percent which is not really helping other people Why should we tolerate businesses that are not helping other people and making profits from that fact? There's no reason for us to tolerate that And at the same time, all of our lives could be a lot better If workers who were more empowered at work, if they were respected, If they had fair and living wages We would actually have a more successful democracy if we had more democracy at work Are you ready I'm not a politician. Did you just announce your candidacy All right, all right, All right. Once again, the book is called Hijacked How Neoliberalism turned the work ethic against workers and how workers can take it back