The Moralization Of Work

You can infer what “the moralization of work” means from the words involved — essentially, linking something to a greater common good or moral/ethical calling, even if the “thing” is basically moving around digital widgets. Tech companies have been doing this for about 20 years now, if not longer; for a while almost every Silicon Valley mission statement had something about “changing the world,” even if the business model was basically just another Uber or platform shit-show.

This whole concept of “moralization of work” takes two forms. The first form is around the “essential workers” concept of the pandemic, where we banged pots and pans together for them at night, but basically allowed them to keep being treated like shit for low pay, and then we created the narrative about how “nobody wants to work anymore” and “Great Resignation” and “quiet quitting” and oh man, business journalism is just awful.

Lindsey Cameron at UPenn has studied this, and this section is important:

It’s good that the screenshot acknowledges that “moralization” is a tactic to control workers, because that’s all it is. When I worked at TCU for 3–4 months, which is a good place but mostly known to others for a few decent college football seasons and hardly known for academics, I was regularly told that my work (as a “marketing copywriter”) was in some way essential to higher education. No. My role was never clear, but in general I was supposed to write gushy stuff about TCU that hopefully would make parents pay $70,000 a year to plop Charlie down here. That’s not a moral calling, but it would get framed that way.

The other side of “work moralization” is the constant performative activism you see, as recently detailed in The Atlantic:

Although political chitchat has always been part of office culture, the volume of the discourse and the extent to which it is coming from management are departures from the past. As a senior manager at a New York insurance firm recently told me, “I probably get just as many emails” from the company’s executives “about social-justice or environmental stuff as I do about how the company is doing. And that’s just not how it was … That’s a major shift that’s only happened in the last two or three years.” Bosses across the country, particularly in white-collar workplaces, are pumping out tweets and press releases about the midterm election, abortion rights, and the war in Ukraine. They are hosting mandatory trainings and workshops that come uncomfortably close to the TV parody.

The whole “Companies are moral arbiters now” thing makes some sense because, well, companies pay us money so we can be consumers, and that’s what keeps the economy humming. So theoretically shouldn’t a company weigh in on important stuff? I get it. But also, companies getting “woke” in a time of insane culture war and ideological stuff is kinda bad and creates classist and political divisions, where old managers complain about how PC everything is now, etc. It divides the workforce according to left-right and often according to age. Collaboration? ROFL.

Jason Fried of Basecamp fame made a good point about all this:

6. No forgetting what we do here. We make project management, team communication, and email software. We are not a social impact company. Our impact is contained to what we do and how we do it. We write business books, blog a ton, speak regularly, we open source software, we give back an inordinate amount to our industry given our size. And we’re damn proud of it. Our work, plus that kind of giving, should occupy our full attention. We don’t have to solve deep social problems, chime in publicly whenever the world requests our opinion on the major issues of the day, or get behind one movement or another with time or treasure. These are all important topics, but they’re not our topics at work — they’re not what we collectively do here. Employees are free to take up whatever cause they want, support whatever movements they’d like, and speak out on whatever horrible injustices are being perpetrated on this group or that (and, unfortunately, there are far too many to choose from). But that’s their business, not ours. We’re in the business of making software, and a few tangential things that touch that edge. We’re responsible for ourselves. That’s more than enough for us.

We don’t need to “moralize” work. We already almost made work into a religion (or, hell, we fully did that). We don’t need to make it into a moral high ground. Go to an office or your laptop, do work, do the best you can, log off when done, get paid every so often, and be nice to customers, clients, and colleagues. Live your life. No?

Takes?