Hard Work Is Its Own Reward: Labor in the 21st Century

“But I’ve always wanted to be a Project Manager,” the overworked girl with bags under her eyes responded to her colleagues suggestion of “figure out what it is you want to be doing and start doing it.” I overheard their exchange as I was clocking in yet another hour of overtime at the headquarters of a disruptor that no one can stop gushing about despite its record of burning through absurd piles of cash and (as of yet) an inability of turning in real profits.

I paused, unplugged my laptop from the curved monitor conspicuously so designed with the intent of blinding my vision from anything unrelated to the onscreen tasks, and upon tossing it into my backpack conceded that my work for the day is done. Monday couldn’t have possibly started off better.

Call me naive, but I was under the impression that the whole point of work has historically been to raise one’s quality of life. When, then, did grinding around the clock not only become looked at as a status symbol but the point of life itself?

I mentioned earlier how I packed my bag and headed home, but the claim of my work for the day being done was a blatant lie. A lamentable one, as working drawn out hours, while long proven by researchers to be counterproductive for the undeniable reason of putting out lower quality work as time goes on appears to be en vogue. Being available 24/7 via the virtual umbilical cords to the office not only signifies you’re in demand, you see... In today’s world it suggests so much more than that — you, my friend, are important and influential!

Feeling ill yet?

Pulling all-nighters, or better still, leaving your kid’s birthday party early to get on a client call is in today’s culture of overwork normal chiefly because it appears impressive to workmates. Wasting a weekend putting together a presentation for Monday wadded with far more information than the client could ever soak in? You’ve just proven your acumen to everyone at the firm.

Okay, so many of the eager beavers may merely be good at pretending to be genuinely clocking in 80-hour workweeks, but there’s something in our culture that makes 25/8 appear way more noble than it should be. While measuring time is easy, measuring the work of the brain isn’t. Has the time not come for us to question society’s slavish devotion to the 40-hour framework, or at the very least the way it’s treated — a one size fits all model for every company employee and job function?

Translation: Do be reminded that this race has no finish line!

The standard workweek, or rather the Fair Labor Standards Act enforced in 1940 has its roots in the industrial age. The world population at the time counted slightly over two billion, of which 70% was rural. Its implementation, by no means a spontaneous act of goodwill, was the result of rallying cries in the latter half of the 19th century, as workers in the building trades and similar industries marched together for better conditions.

The conditions they fought to correct? Not being fired for talking to a fellow employee, which the father of mass production, Henry Ford, was known for doing during his strolls around factories. Lack of bathroom breaks, benefits or sick pay. Safety standards such as fire exit doors, the lack of which often led to the entrapment and deaths of numerous workers during fires.

While the world of work has evolved remarkably since, the rules and regulations we abide by haven’t. New technologies meant to liberate us are increasingly blurring the boundaries between work and non-work time. Despite well documented links between overwork and stress, and between stress and negative health and business outcomes, employees around the world continue toiling at about the same pace as they did earlier in our history.

The average American today works 47 hours a week, with 8 in 10 of us serfs disclosing being stressed at our jobs due to increased responsibilities and stagnating pay. The impact of that stress is considerable — a 2015 study by Harvard Business School revealed that job-related anxiety contributes to more than 120,000 deaths and a whopping $190 billion a year in health care expenses. Indeed, the country suffers from an epidemic of presenteeism, with the general tendency of employees being showing up to work when sick, injured or stressed. The poor sloggers must be well aware that expecting results in those circumstances is about as useless as trying to get Instagrammers to enjoy their food warm, but then again so is the likelihood of a major change of mindset in a culture where toiling for long hours is associated with more pay and career advancement opportunities.

In 1930, John Maynard Keynes erroneously predicted that the working week would be drastically cut, to perhaps 15 hours, with people choosing to have far more leisure as their material needs were satisfied. Within a hundred years, Keynes believed, living standards in progressive countries would be between four and eight times higher and this would leave them with far more time to enjoy the good things in life, like having one. Living standards in developed western economies have indeed seen rapid growth; by 2030 it is likely that they will have risen at least eightfold. What went wrong then?

In the 1980s, when Americans began pushing the envelope on the 40-hour model, Ronald Reagan set the bull loose on Wall Street and it boomed, with banksters holing themselves up in their offices for days at a time putting together monster takeovers that ended with huge paychecks. Their subsequent collaboration with the founders and venture capitalists of Silicon Valley fooled us into believing that being glued to a computer was the only path to inventing the next big thing. It didn’t matter that replicating the lifestyle or compensation of either of the two overlords was undeniably unachievable — the frenzied pace was mindlessly adopted as the golden standard. When 2008 came, external motivation was no longer needed as folks simply feared that if they didn’t look swamped, they might wind up on the unemployment line.

Is discourse on the topic even remotely possible in an era where appearing happy is more important than actually feeling so? When David Graeber, author of Bullshit Jobs wrote his provocative essay on how we’re kept busy doing pointless work, the outpouring of support he received from around the world was unlike anything he anticipated. Corporate lawyers lamenting on how they contribute nothing to humanity. Telemarketers declaring that the world would be a better place if their industry was to vanish in a puff of smoke. A survey conducted by YouGov revealed that 37 to 40 percent of all people who had jobs were convinced that if theirs didn’t exist, it would make no difference at all.

So listen up, Bezos! You too, Tim Cook. Did you know that Henry Ford, who you undoubtedly worship actually adopted the 40-hour workweek in 1924, years before it was the law? He didn’t do it because he was soft-hearted, he simply thought his employees would buy more cars if they had more leisure time! All of your robots and snazzy tech was in one way or another produced collectively by all of us. Indeed, everything is a product of our forefathers’ hundreds of years of thinking and laboring — do the right thing and pay us all back. Please stop waiting for the heads of states’ O.K., we know well they’re on your payroll. Give everybody a basic income and leave it for us to decide what to do with our time. Otherwise, we risk living in a world in which more people dream of becoming PM’s.

Written by

Łódź Fabryczna born, Cairo raised. Calling New York home until I’m a man of leisure with a pomegranate farm.

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade