Abstract
A recent trend from the world of work to go viral was the phenomenon known as “quiet quitting.” Gallup described it in a September 6, 2022 report as workers “not going above and beyond at work and just meeting their job description.” The survey accompanying the report led with the seemingly alarming finding that “‘[q]uiet quitters’ make up at least 50 percent of the U.S. workforce—probably more” (Harter 2022).
Quiet quitting provided fodder for countless hand‐wringing op-eds and thinkpieces, predictably followed by a wave of pieces raising questions about the trend. These critics pointed out that what some were describing as “quiet quitting” amounted to people showing up for work and doing their job. Some reported being “disengaged” from their work, but nothing outside of historical averages.
How did showing up for work come to be seen as tantamount to quitting? To understand this, we must turn to the narratives we tell ourselves about the world of work. There is of course the enduring narrative of the American work ethic, where “going above and beyond” is the norm. Traditionally this was tied to notions like “a fair day's work for a fair day's pay,” whereby going above and beyond would be rewarded with job security, decent wages and benefits, and a pension to retire on after a career of hard work.
In this narrative, “quiet quitting” makes sense to the extent that “a fair day's work” implies “giving it your all” and not just punching the clock. Meeting the job description is not enough to hold up workers’ end of the bargain.
But there are two sides to this bargain, and when we look at the employer side, it's clear that they abandoned their side of the bargain decades ago—and not very quietly. Rather, it was a highly publicized onslaught of plant closings, “downsizing,” and union‐busting, later followed by consultant‐led work redesign, algorithmic management, and other methods of getting workers to do more with less. As a result, decent wages and benefits, job security, predictable schedules, and reliable pensions are a fantasy for many workers today.
Instead, workers are supposed to embrace the “flexibility” of charting their own career path, guided by the idea of “doing what you love.” Now it is not only the sculptor driven by their art or the doctor committed to their Hippocratic oath who is supposed to pursue their calling. Subway “sandwich artists” and low‐paid hospital orderlies are asked to bring “passion” and “purpose” to their work.
A pair of recent books explores these changes in the world of work and how they have affected workers’ lives. In the process, they explode many of the myths surrounding the past, present, and future of work in the United States.
Gabriel Winant's The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America tells the story through a focus on Pittsburgh, the former “Steel City” that is now a health care hub. Meanwhile, Sarah Jaffe's Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone is an exploration of modern‐day service work, primarily in the United States.
Neither book intends to provide a causal account of why the changes they observe have occurred. Rather, they bring those changes to life, translating dry aggregate statistics about employment shifts into gripping narratives that show how these changes have affected everyday people.
Winant begins his book with the fitting image of the UPMC (University of Pittsburgh Medical Center) Tower, which until its rebranding was better known as the USS (U.S. Steel) Tower, a massive skyscraper looming over all of Pittsburgh. It serves as a metaphor for the economic transformation of the city from a steel manufacturing center to a health care hub.
At first glance the reader might be forgiven for thinking that The Next Shift is yet another book about the decline of manufacturing and the rise of service employment. After all, the subtitle is The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America. If the book were simply a study of Pittsburgh, then this would be accurate. It is impossible to ignore the shuttered steel mills along the banks of the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio rivers, replaced by gleaming office towers and health care campuses in Pittsburgh. But it would be a mistake to view Winant's story as part of a broader, all‐too‐common narrative about the decline of manufacturing in the United States. That's because Pittsburgh's story is not the national story.
Despite decades of deindustrialization, manufacturing still contributed 11 percent of value added to the GDP in 2022, as compared to 8.5 percent for education, health care, and social assistance, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. While a decline from its postwar heyday, there is still plenty of manufacturing in the United States. It's just not in Pittsburgh.
But Winant is digging for something deeper than a story about a sectoral shift from manufacturing to service sector employment. Underlying that sectoral shift lies a more profound paradox: [P]rofits accrue increasingly to firms that do not generate mass employment, while labor simultaneously accumulates in low‐margin industries far from profits. The accumulation of capital is more and more decoupled from employment not just by formal corporate structures but also by the mix of commodities that human labor is required to produce. What has changed is not just the corporate organization of labor markets but also, beneath it, the social division of labor. (p. 2)
Notwithstanding Winant's misleading subtitle, the shift in The Next Shift is really about this shift in the social division of labor. More specifically, it's about a shift in how and where we care for each other throughout our lives. As such, it's less about the shift from manufacturing to service jobs than it is about the shifting relationship between productive and reproductive labor in capitalist society.
Here Pittsburgh serves as more of a representative case. Consistent with Winant's observation about the decoupling of profit‐making and employment, manufacturing made up roughly 8 percent of employment in 2022, as opposed to 15 percent for education, health care, and social assistance, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Likewise, the second- and sixth‐largest occupations in the United States are currently home health and personal care aides and registered nurses. This makes Pittsburgh an ideal place to study the reorganization of productive and reproductive labor in the United States.
To start, Winant brings the reader into the home and work lives of mid‐century steel mill workers, both black and white (unsurprisingly, the experiences are quite different). Not only does his account differ from previous accounts of work in the steel industry by incorporating the grueling and stressful reproductive labor in the home that went into making the productive work in the factory possible, but it also calls into question received wisdom about unionized mid‐century factory work as stable, secure work. Working in the steel mills, “only a short distance lay between economic security and disaster. Every working‐class family could imagine the steep fall and the possible sequences of events that might trigger it—layoff, strike, injury, sickness, death. Everyone knew a few people to whom these had happened” (p. 98).
The vaunted pay, benefits, and job security of the mills could only go so far, especially for Black workers. In the mill towns, the so‐called “age of security” could only work to the extent that it was backstopped by networks of “kin and community.” This tied together working‐class steel communities through bonds of mutual obligation, but also necessity, particularly for the wives who bore the brunt of the male‐breadwinner model of social reproduction in the home.
But this obligatory interconnectedness also meant that survival was a fundamentally social endeavor, with public institutions playing a critical role in maintaining social cohesion, particularly for white workers. Along with churches and schools, few institutions played a more critical role than the hospitals. They stood as concrete embodiments of the security steelworkers had fought for and won through their union in the 1930s and 1940s. And as the steel industry declined in the area, workers relied ever more on the security of their health benefits to get by.
The aging steelworker population combined with a declining funding base as the mills closed strained the health care system, exposing the limits of the private welfare state that the steelworkers’ union had built up for its members in the postwar decades. This crisis contributed to the transformation of health care starting in the 1970s and, by extension, the transformation of Pittsburgh into the health care hub it is today.
What is crucial for Winant's narrative is that the political‐economic shift from manufacturing to health care and services was accompanied by a shift in the social organization of reproductive labor. As the mills closed, the community support structures that sustained them unraveled. Not only did schools and community hospitals close, but family structures fragmented as well.
The one thing that remained for many was union‐negotiated health benefits. As Winant shows, health care consumption became a substandard substitute for the previous community support system. But it was an increasingly privatized and commodified support system, as health care companies UPMC (University of Pittsburgh Medical Center) and Highmark (a merger of Blue Cross of Western Pennsylvania and Blue Shield) battled it out for market share in a new model of health care delivery and administration that was for‐profit in all but name.
This new system consumed ever‐vaster amounts of labor, as care work moved from the home to the market, while cutting costs to maximize returns for investors meant that management sought to keep that labor as low‐wage as possible. This in turn generated efforts from these new groups of workers to improve their wages and working conditions, as well as efforts from these new health care conglomerates to avoid addressing workers’ concerns.
Winant documents this shift in the structure of class conflict and labor organization in the latter chapters of the book. Now it was largely female, largely black and brown care workers advancing labor's cause, while the companies pushed back not with bayonets and labor spies, as did the steel barons of previous generations, but by seeking to absolve themselves of responsibility for their own workforce.
Here workers confronted two core challenges of modern work and labor organizing: the “fissured workplace,” with its layers of subcontracting and complex ownership structures (Weil 2014), and the ideology of sacrifice and service that underlies much care work. The former, along with labor law that denied health care workers any collective bargaining rights until 1974, made it difficult even to find a forum to advance demands, while the latter provided justification for low pay and abusive working conditions, as the “mission-driven” work of health care organizations suggested that workers should do the work out of a broader sense of purpose, not for personal gain.
And this is where Winant intersects with Jaffe. The narrative that Pittsburgh health care corporations used to justify overworking and underpaying their staff is just a particularly cynical variant of a common trope when discussing the contemporary world of work, summarized in the “do what you love” mantra that threads its way through countless self‐help books, memes, and motivational posters.
While the idea that the motivation to work hard should be driven by passion, not pecuniary interests, has a long pedigree going back to ascetic religious orders of various traditions, under modern capitalism it takes on a different meaning. As Jaffe shows, it can become yet another tool in management's arsenal for labor control.
To be clear, external methods of management control remain in force. Any assembly line worker, UPS worker subject to supervisory harassment, or Uber driver dealing with surveillance and algorithmic management can attest to that. But the “do what you love” ethos burrows into the hearts and minds of individual workers, exerting discipline and control from the inside out. It takes the care ethic that motivates the labor we do for family and friends in the home and extends it into the workplace.
The result, as Jaffe shows, is a blurring of the lines between productive and reproductive labor. This does have real benefits for some in terms of greater flexibility in organizing one's workday and choosing one's own career path. But for many it only serves to intensify exploitation.
Jaffe meets with domestic workers, who are tasked with some of the most intimate jobs imaginable. They tell her how their employers consider them to be “one of the family” when convenient, as they are asked to shower the children for whom they care with endless affection, even as they neglect their own children. Meanwhile, “the worker seldom received such love in return. And if she did, it was often expected to be accepted in lieu of cash wages” (p. 64). Indeed, feelings of familial ties could quickly dissipate when employers were confronted with questions of wages and working conditions, leaving domestic workers materially, emotionally, sometimes even physically vulnerable.
As with health care workers, whom Jaffe also interviews, domestic workers have long straddled the line between work and home. The difference lies in how this work fits into the economic and social world that Winant describes, where wage labor is pooled in low‐margin industries—most notably the care economy. The work itself remains similar, as the labor involved in caring for others remains difficult to mechanize and automate—a key reason the care economy remains low‐margin and labor‐intensive. But the social and political relationships have changed.
Most notably, more of the work traditionally done inside the home has been commodified and is done for wages, particularly as more women have taken on paid work outside the home. Additionally, more care work itself has moved outside the home, often becoming the paid work that women are tasked with doing. And care work has become globalized, with much of the labor provided by immigrants from the global South. This has created new dynamics of exploitation and vulnerability, but, as Jaffe shows, the immigrant networks this creates have also led to new avenues for organizing and legislative reform.
But the “do what you love” ethos creates problems that extend far beyond care work. Jaffe explores its pervasive, pernicious, but also complex effects across a variety of industries: teaching, retail, nonprofits, art and creative work, technology, internships, sports, and, of particular interest to many readers of this journal, academia. In each case, passion for the work generates productivity for employers, while often serving as a substitute for material compensation and as a justification for exploitative hours and substandard working conditions.
The result, Jaffe argues, is that “[c]apitalist society has transformed work into love, and love, conversely, into work” (p. 325). By this she means that the drive to love our work has affected our ability to love people: “our personal relationships are to be squeezed in around the edges, fitted into busy schedules, or sacrificed entirely to the demands of the workplace” (p. 326). We see this reflected in frayed families and friendship networks, along with increased loneliness, stress, anxiety, and the attendant mental health problems these entail. While popular discourse blames social media or eroding morals for these social ills, Jaffe sees them as the predictable outcome of a system that demands so many of us to give body and soul to our work.
What complicates matters is that the love we put into our work is often genuine. Teachers do love teaching, and they care about their students. Health care workers do care about their patients. Actors, writers, and artists do love their craft, and are motivated by their creative spark. This leads many of us to go “above and beyond” for our work, sometimes into territory that can seem exploitative. Jaffe herself notes at one point that she is working on the book at night, having spent close to twelve hours straight at her computer, not having eaten much during the day—and she counts herself among those fortunate enough to make ends meet as a freelancer (p. 15).
The issue then is not excising love from work. Rather, it involves renegotiating the terms of our relationships between love and work. Jaffe asks us to envision a world where work can be a source of challenge and fulfillment without sacrificing material security, our ability to seek fulfillment outside of work, or our ability to love and connect with each other.
At a deeper level, the challenge that Jaffe lays out is connected to the challenge underlying Winant's study as well: how to ensure human flourishing in a world where much of the work that needs to get done is distant from centers of capital accumulation.
While both authors judiciously refrain from proposing laundry lists of policy solutions to the problems they pose, the question they both raise is how to redress the power imbalance between labor and capital in contemporary capitalist society.
Here unions and policy reforms must play a key role, and both authors provide important examples of each. Winant documents the organizing of health care workers, largely women and people of color, who have become the face of today's labor movement in Pittsburgh, replacing the steelworkers of the postwar years. Health care worker unions also feature in Jaffe's narrative, along with those of teachers, academics, athletes, and nonprofit workers. She also highlights more novel forms of worker organization among domestic workers, tech workers, gig workers, even artists.
Policy-wise, Winant focuses on identifying the right problems as opposed to highlighting possible solutions. He shows how the patchwork for‐profit U.S. health care system has served as a second‐rate stand-in for an actual welfare state, as the symptoms of rising inequality and deunionization have spilled over into the health care system. This has driven up costs and generated political conflict, as “[t]he bottomless demand for care services begotten by the unequal transformation of American society grinds against the political and economic resistance to the expenditure of ever more resources on care, especially care for the poor” (p. 261). At the same time, it has helped establish a low‐wage pattern for the U.S. labor market, as health care companies strive to contain costs by suppressing wages and employment.
For her part, Jaffe does identify some promising policy solutions, such as the Domestic Worker Bill of Rights in New York, regulations mandating intern compensation, and establishing minimum standards for gig economy workers, to name a few. But her sights are set on something deeper than better wages and working conditions, as important as those are. Ultimately, her concern is rebuilding the human connections that the “do what you love” ethic has torn asunder. Here she can point to the space for connection that social movements afford us, be it an Occupy encampment or a union drive. But these remain far too fleeting. There are no easy answers for finding more durable connections. However, as with Winant's assessment of the current organization of social production and reproduction, the search for solutions starts with an identification of the problem.
Winant and Jaffe leave us both uncomfortable and hopeful about the future of work. While the present they describe is bleak, they show that it is a product of human actions, and thus at once unstable and not inevitable. That leaves open the possibility of a future “next shift” where work is focused on meeting human needs and leaving space for the human connection we currently lack.