The Bleak History of the American Work Ethic

What is a “work ethic”? In its most common usage, the phrase connotes a personal quality: the capacity and enthusiasm for hard work, claimed in countless cover letters and celebrated in graduation speeches. In the hands of politicians, capitalists, and certain members of the chattering class, it is a collective phenomenon at the heart of a society and economy: a set of ideas and attitudes about work, centered on the inherent moral and social value of toil, that both fuels and legitimates accumulation. Articulated most famously by Max Weber in 1904’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (written after his visit to the St. Louis World’s Fair that same year), the work ethic as a social good has been used to explain—and justify—inequalities at many scales for nearly a century, from the relative success of different groups of immigrant workers to the making of global empires. Herein lies a fundamental tension: Under capitalism, we are taught from an early age to cultivate our personal work ethic, but we go on to labor in a world structured by a collective work ethic that we did not make—one that demands not just our labor but our belief in its constructed meaning.