What do we mean by "the dignity of work"?
To get you in the Labor Day spirit, I wrote a short essay for America magazine about the dignity of work and Pope Leo XIII's radical vision of labor rights. The piece was prompted by a surprising essay on this topic by Sen. Marco Rubio, published at First Things. Rubio wrote thoughtfully about how Catholic social teaching (to which Leo XIII made a crucial contribution) informs his perspective on labor. Rubio complains about the power of financial capital and the diminishing share of productivity that goes to labor. He talks about dignity as something jobs ought to have, but too often do not, on account of poor wages and security. In short, he doesn't sound like a Republican. (That said, Rubio earned a 0% rating from the AFL-CIO for his votes on labor issues in 2017. It remains to be seen if his pro-labor rhetoric portends a shift in his voting patterns. I hope it does.) In my essay, I go into the differing ways Democrats and Republicans talk about the dignity of work -- officials from both parties use the term, just not in the same way -- and what Leo meant by it. I invite you to give it a read.
And by the way, Rubio got hammered in the comments by First Things' conservative readership. If that indicates anything, then don't expect a massive shift in Republican voters' thinking on labor and capital any time soon.
I've passed a major milestone regarding the burnout book: I have a shitty first draft! My summer goal was to write a draft based on what I knew from several years of research and reporting on work and burnout, and I came up with about 50,000 words, about 80% of the total I'm aiming for. The good thing about setting a first-draft goal is that as long as you keep writing a little each day, you can't fail to hit it. It's a rough sketch, inherently incomplete. You can call it "good enough" at just about any point. Then you go through it more carefully. To me, revision is the fun part. I plan to spend the next seven or eight months learning more and shaping what I have into something people might want to read. Then I'll give it a last coat of polish and send it in. (And eventually I'll revise it further, based on the publisher's and readers' comments.)
I don't usually write this way. Ordinarily, I want to know everything I'm going to know before I start a draft. (This is not to say that such drafts are un-shitty.) Early this summer I started doing more research on burnout and realized I could end up researching forever, and never feel ready to write, because I didn't really know what I needed to know. I didn't have a good information filter. So I took some advice you hear from a lot of wise people (I heard it from my wife, who heard it from Robert Boice) and I started before I felt ready. I just wrote what I knew. Along the way, I realized some of what I needed to know, and I did enough research to fill in some gaps. (Believe me, though: enormous gaps remain.) And now, I know better what I'm trying to say. Next, I'll try to say it better.
One final Labor Day reading: Jason Tebbe's post about quitting, on his wide-ranging and always-excellent blog. Jason is a fellow academic-quitter. He writes that his tenure-track job teaching history, "the thing I spent seven years in grad school and two years in a 'visiting' position fighting to have ... turned out to be a nightmare." At some point, "I decided that my life was meant to be better than that. I have never felt more free than the day I told my [department] chair that I was gone." I get that, though I resigned my teaching job with more despondency. But as Jason points out, workers' ability to quit is their greatest power in confronting their bosses and winning better rights and conditions.
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