Revisiting How Neoliberalism Turned the Work Ethic Against Workers (with Elizabeth Anserson)

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer

Episode: Revisiting How Neoliberalism Turned the Work Ethic Against Workers (with Elizabeth Anderson)

Date: January 13, 2026
Host: Nick Hanauer and Civic Ventures team
Guest: Professor Elizabeth Anderson, University of Michigan

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Episode Overview

This episode revisits the moral and economic transformation of the so-called "work ethic"—specifically, how neoliberal ideology twisted the historical meaning of hard work into a tool for blaming workers and justifying unfair economic outcomes. Host Nick Hanauer and the Civic Ventures team speak with Elizabeth Anderson, acclaimed philosopher and author of Hijacked: How Neoliberalism Turned the Work Ethic Against Workers and How Workers Can Take It Back, examining the work ethic’s religious roots, its co-option by capital, and the way forward for workers.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Historical Roots of the Work Ethic

[06:00 – 08:33]

• Anderson traces the "work ethic" back to 17th-century Puritan England, emphasizing its original purpose:

  "The real, the worst violators of the work ethic are the idle and the predatory rich...anybody who made money without contributing to society, but are just extracting wealth from it."
  — Elizabeth Anderson [06:46]

• Early work ethic honored workers: fair wages, dignity, and social value were its tenets.
• The rise of neoliberalism flipped this ethic: work became reduced to drudgery for maximizing employer profit, stripping away dignity, voice, and social worth.

2. Work Ethic and the Social Contract

[08:33 – 10:09]

• Discussion of John Locke and other Enlightenment philosophers whose ideas about property and government have been misappropriated by modern libertarians.
• Anderson argues Locke advocated a "progressive work ethic" that justified state action for the welfare of all.
• The state, in Locke’s conception, should adjust property rights to safeguard everyone’s welfare—not just the wealthy.

3. Industrial Revolution: The Splitting of Worker and Capitalist

[10:34 – 13:30]

• With mass industrialization, workers and owners became two distinct classes, dividing the work ethic:

  "At the Industrial Revolution…you also get an ideological fight where the work ethic is split apart: where the capitalists say, 'we’re the ones who should get all the benefits of that hard work,' and the workers say, 'what are you talking about?'"
  — Elizabeth Anderson [11:28]

• The ownership of capital became separated from labor, making exploitation easier and undermining the pro-worker version of the ethic.

4. The Moral Revolution—Honoring Workers

[14:24 – 15:33]

• The Puritan "moral revolution" uplifted workers, linking social esteem and the meaning of work to labor rather than leisure.
• Ancient societies aspired to leisure; the Protestant ethic made meaningful, honored labor the goal.

5. Internalizing the Work Ethic—How Neoliberalism Shapes Our Minds

[16:00 – 17:29, 19:03 – 20:30]

• Even those outside religious traditions absorb the American work ethic; asceticism and frugality become personal virtues.
• Americans are more driven by work than their European counterparts, partly due to economic necessity (e.g., lack of guaranteed vacation), but also due to societal values.

6. Comparing International Work Cultures

[20:21 – 21:56]

• Scandinavian social democracies exemplify a more advanced, pro-worker work ethic that balances meaning, dignity, and shared prosperity.
• Meaningfulness in work is more common in economies that honor workers practically and culturally.

7. The Changing Nature of Work and Worker Satisfaction

[22:24 – 27:12]

• Modern economies have created both fulfilling and soul-crushing jobs.
• Surprising data: the "happiest" workers are lumberjacks, farmers, and fishers—highly skilled, outdoors jobs—while professionals/scientists can be dissatisfied due to loss of autonomy.

  "One of the lowest ranked in terms of work satisfaction was the professional class. Professionals and scientists."
  — Elizabeth Anderson [24:34]

• Adjunct professors exemplify how neoliberal policies can turn meaningful work into exploitation with low pay and no security.

8. Neoliberal Distortion: Drudgery, Proletarianization, and the Economy of Esteem

[27:12 – 29:03, 32:38 – 32:48]

• Neoliberalism "proletarianizes" everyone, eliminating job security and rewarding extractive, rather than productive or meaningful, work.
• The "economy of esteem" fuels a toxic culture rewarding wealth regardless of its social value:

  "How much you have…are paid is a sign of how much you've contributed to society. It's just wrong."
  — Elizabeth Anderson [32:20]

9. Policy Solutions: Empowering Workers

[30:01 – 31:10]

• The top priority: empower workers, especially through labor law reform.
• U.S. union laws are hostile; sectoral bargaining (as in Europe) can give unions real power even with low formal membership.

  "I do think reforming labor law would be a critical way to expand the power of unions."
  — Elizabeth Anderson [30:49]

10. Democratizing Work—The Deeper Prescription

[33:20 – 34:54]

• Anderson, echoing John Dewey, calls for "deepening democracy" in the workplace through practical experiments:
  • Worker councils
  • Co-determination (workers on boards)

  "That active practice of collective autonomy in a kind of participatory form in the workplace can also help reinforce democracy at large..."
  — Elizabeth Anderson [34:22]

11. The Ladder Analogy – How Structure, Not Effort, Determines Outcomes

[36:16 – 38:00]

• The current economy is like a ladder with missing rungs and enormous gaps between the bottom and top—structural factors, not individual effort, drive inequality.
• Neoliberal ideology obscures this, leading to internalized blame and “deaths of despair.”

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Original Work Ethic:

  "The real, the worst violators of the work ethic are the idle and the predatory rich."
  — Elizabeth Anderson [06:46]

• On Internalizing the Work Ethic:

  "It's almost embarrassing how much this work ethic is internalized. I... lead a pretty ascetic lifestyle...Everything I do is about my work."
  — Civic Ventures co-host [16:09]

• On Union Reform:

  "Reforming labor law would be a critical way to expand the power of unions."
  — Elizabeth Anderson [30:49]

• On Wage and Esteem:

  "How much you have, you know, are paid is a sign of how much you've contributed to society. It's just wrong."
  — Elizabeth Anderson [32:38]

• On Democracy at Work:

  "I'd want to have workers have much greater say in how work is organized, really perform democratic functions."
  — Elizabeth Anderson [33:33]

• On the End of Neoliberal Ideology:

  "I think we've reached peak neoliberalism in terms of ideology, and it's on its decline, that's for sure."
  — Nick Hanauer [38:57]

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Key Timestamps for Important Segments

• Opening Commentary & Episode Setup [00:02 – 04:45]
• Elizabeth Anderson’s Main Thesis [06:00 – 08:33]
• Work Ethic vs. Social Contract (Locke, Smith, Mill) [08:33 – 10:34]
• Splitting of Workers and Capitalists in the Industrial Revolution [10:34 – 13:30]
• Modern Internalization & Gendered Experiences [16:00 – 19:03]
• Work Culture: U.S. vs. Scandinavia/Europe [20:21 – 21:56]
• Job Satisfaction—Lumberjacks vs. Professionals [22:53 – 27:12]
• Neoliberalism’s Impact—Proletarianization [27:12 – 29:03]
• Prescription: Reforming Labor Laws & Union Power [30:01 – 31:10]
• Workers' Esteem and Democratizing the Workplace [32:38 – 34:54]
• Structural Inequality – The Ladder Analogy [36:16 – 38:00]
• Final Reflections: Why Anderson Does This Work [39:56 – 41:05]

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Episode Tone & Conclusions

The conversation is both scholarly and accessible, treating philosophy as urgently relevant to ordinary economic life. Anderson and the hosts mix historical analysis, personal reflection, and sharp critique, aiming not only to diagnose neoliberal distortions but to inspire constructive change. There is skepticism about how entrenched norms can shift, but also a sense that the current moment—amid labor actions, political shifts, and renewed attention to inequality—is ripe for reimagining the meaning of work and its rewards.

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Final Thoughts

Elizabeth Anderson’s thesis reframes the "work ethic" as a tool for worker dignity, social trust, and shared prosperity, not merely individual obligation or self-blame. The challenge for the U.S., she argues, is to untangle the values of productivity, esteem, and social contract from their neoliberal misuse, using reforms and workplace democracy to put workers back at the center of economic meaning.

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Highly recommended: Elizabeth Anderson’s book, Hijacked: How Neoliberalism Turned the Work Ethic Against Workers and How Workers Can Take It Back.

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Transcript

[A]

The rising inequality and growing political instability that we see today are the direct result of decades of bad economic theory.

[B]

The last five decades of trickle down economics haven't worked. But what's the alternative?

[A]

Middle out economics is the answer.

[B]

Because the middle class is the source of growth, not its consequence.

[A]

That's right.

[B]

This is Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer, a podcast about how to build the economy from the middle out. Welcome to the show.

[C]

Hey, Pitchfork listeners. I'm Freddie, producer at Pitchfork Economics. We've been told for decades that if you just work hard enough, the economy will meet you halfway. But today we're revisiting an episode called How Neoliberalism Turned the Work Ethic Against Workers. And it shows how that promise was slipped on. Professor Elizabeth Anderson explains how neoliberalism rewired our moral language, turning ideas like responsibility and self reliance into tools for blaming workers for a system that was never designed to work for them. If you've ever felt like you're running faster but falling further behind, this episode explains why.

[B]

You know, Nick, one of the things that I missed during the pandemic is that, you know, since it came on, you've delegated our annual reviews, so I don't really get your feedback. And I know you love my work, the quality of my work, else you wouldn't be putting up with me. But I'm curious what you think of my work ethic.

[A]

Yeah, it's medium. Medium.

[B]

I'm not my. You can see my nose. It's not to the grindstone. No, it's not to the grindstone. I'm not earning you enough money. Enough.

[A]

No, no. Too slow and not enough.

[B]

I should be working harder. Yeah, right. Which we joke. But the work ethic is this what people call the Protestant work ethic is so ingrained in American minds, it gets to know when we write, when we write about politics, when we're trying to instruct politicians on how to talk about the economy. One of the things that always strikes me, Nick, is we have to use that phrase. Hardworking Americans, like Americans, are proud of how hard they work. And if you don't use that phrase, it's dishonoring them. And this is true. We see it in the focus groups. That is a positive to say, to honor hard work when really, personally, I think that hard work is overrated.

[A]

Yeah, well, and you're right. I mean, certainly in this country, people derive a lot of their, oh, social value, dignity and status from work. And one of the reasons that. One of the reasons that the country is so upside down and polarized is that the majority of citizens, I think that's fair to say, aren't compensated anywhere near the value that they create in society. And the people who make the most money in our society often contribute very little or nothing obvious or in some.

[B]

Cases, huge amounts of harm. Yeah. They detract from social welfare. They're engaged in activities that are not just unproductive, but are counterproductive.

[A]

Yeah, absolutely. And apropos of all of this, today we get to talk to, well, she may be the world's expert now in work ethic, our old friend Professor Elizabeth Anderson, who specializes in moral, social, and political philosophy, and who appeared on the podcast a couple of three years ago talking about her last book, Private How Employers Rule Our Lives and why We Don't Talk About It. And she has a new book out called Hijacked How Neoliberalism Turned the Work Ethic Against Workers and How Workers Can Take It Back. You know, and on this day, when we're doing this podcast, which was effectively the day that President Biden joined the picket lines in the UAW strike, this is such a great day to talk to Elizabeth about this very important. This very important issue, how we think about work and who we're working for and so on and so forth.

[D]

So I'm Elizabeth Anderson. I'm Max Shea, professor of Public philosophy at University of Michigan. And my new book, just released a few days ago, is called Hijacked How Neoliberalism Turned the Work Ethic Against Workers and How Workers Can Take It Back. And it's a romp through the history of the Protestant work ethic from the 17th century to the present.

[B]

Well, thanks for coming back. You know, I re. Listened to our last conversation with you, and oh, my God, I hadn't realized it was three years ago. You lose track of time in the. In the world of COVID And just to show how ethical we are, where we left it with you was that we would have you back on when your book came out. So here you are. We've lived up to our end of the bargain, and I have to tell you, you hit a sweet spot for me, which is, like you said, a romp through history. This. It's a combination of intellectual history and moral philosophy and economics. If you could just start off by, you know, explaining the main thesis of the book.

[D]

Yeah. So we're all familiar with a version of the work ethic which came to us from England and under which most workers today are toiling. And that's the theory that says that workers have to be drudges toiling away for the maximum profit of their employer and aren't entitled to any say in the conditions of their work because it's just nose to the grindstone for them. And that's basically what neoliberalism consigns workers to. But what I show in my book is that there's a whole other tradition of the work ethic that's been more or less repressed in the United States. And if you go back to the 17th century Puritans in England who created the work ethic, these are mostly ministers. They said, look, the real, the worst violators of the work ethic are the idle and the predatory rich. These are the people who make money without helping anybody else. There are the landlords who charge insane rents that make the yeoman farmers lives impossible. They're the exploitative employers who tyrannize over their workers. They're the users who are, you know, basically credit predatory creditors who are charging exploitative interest rates. You know, there's a whole list of people, but basically they were attacking anybody who made money without contributing to society, but are just extracting wealth from it. I think we can all recognize some of those business models today. And so they said instead that workers should be honored for the work they do when it contributes to human welfare. And that means they're entitled to fair and living wages, that they shouldn't be abused at work by their bosses, and that we can trust them to internalize the work ethic so you don't have to punish and extort work out of them, because people actually find meaning in serving one another, in helping people out. And as long as they get recognition from that, you can be confident that they will work hard.

[A]

Interesting. So, Elizabeth, how do we distinguish between the work ethic and the a social contract?

[D]

There's kind of a connection between the social contract and the work ethic, which we can trace to John Locke.

[A]

Yeah.

[D]

So Locke is often portrayed in contemporary political philosophy as a kind of libertarian who thinks, well, once you acquire property legitimately, you have total rights over it. You can accumulate as much as you want. What I argue is that actually Locke was an advocate of what I call the progressive work ethic or the pro worker work ethic, that second version of the work ethic that I just described and that the social contract actually involves. So the social contract in general is just the idea that government is established by the consent of the people. And the content of our Constitution has to be the kind of thing that everyone could consent to because it helps Each and every individual person in society. And what Locke argues is contrary to the libertarian view, that in fact, once we join a social contract and establish a state, the state goes around and changes property rights, the configuration of property rights, to make sure that everyone really is taken care of. So he advocates a welfare state.

[B]

It's interesting in the book you mention not just Locke, but also Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, that today they're like heroes of libertarianism. But you say that that's a misinterpretation. How is it that the right managed to hijack these philosophers to serve their end?

[D]

So you interviewed me last time about private government and in a way Hijacked is a sequel to that earlier book, right? Because what I'm arguing is that at the time of the Industrial Revolution, we see a split in the work ethic between these two different versions. One which is very demanding of workers and the other which actually honors workers and calls for those rewards that they should get. But the reason for that is that the Industrial Revolution itself divided people into, you know, a capitalist class and a worker class who were completely distinct groups of people. Whereas the model workers for the puritans of the 17th century were yeoman farmers and craftsmen. And these were people who owned their own capital. They were small business people. If the yeoman didn't literally own the farm that they labored on, they had a 99 year lease. Yeah, very long run lease. So they could afford to invest in the productivity of the soil and in farming implements and so forth. So both of them, they got the rewards in virtue of working hard because they also owned their own productive capital. And so at the Industrial Revolution, because these two classes of people, the owners and the workers, split apart, you also get an ideological fight where the work ethic is split apart, right? Where the capitalists say, well, we're the ones who should get all the benefits of that hard work. And the workers say, what are you talking about? The work ethic says we're the ones who should be getting the benefits. That's where we got that split between the two work ethics. One basically articulating the interests of capitalists and the other articulating the interests of workers. And what I argue and hijacked is that the workers were right. That's a more authentic version of the work ethic, given that the Puritans railed against extractive and predatory business models by which capitalists can just use their monopoly power and so forth to extract wealth from other parties without giving anything back. Now, of course it does mean that, say Small business people who are actually actively involved in running their firm, they count as workers under the work ethic. So it's not a pure split between capitalists and workers, but the Industrial Revolution, you had an awful lot of people who really were engaged in extraction. And of course, you could say the same about private equity today and predatory banking and so forth.

[A]

So your book traces this intellectual history from the. What is it, 1600s on. Yeah, you know, I was just. For whatever bizarre reason. Reason. Rereading or reading for the first time, actually, some of. Will, you remember the historian Will Durant, Right.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

And I took myself through Greece and Rome and so on and so forth. I was struck. And I don't mean to imply that Will Durant is the authority on these subjects, but that he just raised the same kind of issues of the tension between workers and businesses and exploitation and stuff like that from those days, too. So one of my questions is, how old is this split? Is this split in how we think about work as old as humanity? Or did something truly new happen in the last couple hundred years?

[D]

Yes. So here's the thing. Of course, throughout human history, the rich have always wanted the poor to work really hard for them. Right.

[A]

Yeah.

[D]

The difference is. And this is really what made the work ethic a moral revolution in the 17th century. It's that exaltation part. It's the idea that workers need to be honored, that our work activity is a fundamentally meaningful and important activity that we should respect and honor. You didn't see that in ancient Rome. Right, Right. So, in fact, my argument is it's the uplifting of workers that is the moral revolution in the Industrial Revolution. I'm sorry, in the Protestant work ethic at its origins. Because it's saying this is central to the meaningfulness of human life, of our activities. Whereas before, everyone's aspiration was to become leisure, to have other people work for them, but not to have to lift a finger for anybody else.

[B]

And in the conservative version, it still says, we have to work hard, but our reward is in the next world, not in this one.

[D]

That's one version. Right. Or some of them just think, well, the rich are better than anybody else, so they should get the profits. Right?

[A]

Right.

[B]

Are you having a problem with this, Nick? Is this.

[A]

I'm clearly not making you work hard enough, though.

[B]

This is what's going on. Well, you know, it's funny you say that, Nick, because, you know, I think some people listening to this might think, oh, yeah, you're talking to a philosopher. How is this really relevant? In most people's lives. But if I'm a little bit introspective, I. God, it's almost embarrassing how much this work ethic is internalized. I lead a pretty ascetic lifestyle. I mean, maybe you as my boss might not think I have a work ethic, but I certainly. Everything I do is about my work. I mean, that's what I care about most, is my impact on the world. Am I having impact? Am I making it better or worse? I scrimp and I save. And you know, you pay me a lot more nick than I made before I went to work with you. And it doesn't really show up in my spending because I have this idea that I should be frugal, which is part of this work ethic. And I didn't get this from church, obviously, or from synagogue. I'm not a religious person. And yet here I am ascribing to almost all of the American work ethic. Yeah, Elizabeth, again, how does this happen? How does it capture us this way?

[D]

You know, first of all, I do think that not every society has this. I do think that the work ethic is very much alive, you know, in the lives of many, many Americans. We work more hours.

[A]

Yes.

[D]

Than our counterparts in Europe. Now, part of it is just constraint because, you know, only half of all American workers even have vacate paid vacation. And they get that through their employer. We're the only rich country in the world that has exactly zero days of state guaranteed paid vacation. But it's also the case that I think Americans tend to be a bit driven by their work. They know they, they find that a center of meaning during their work lives. And a lot of it is because people don't want to feel useless. You know, there's been discussion lately about the crisis of men. Men, I think, suffer more from a crisis of uselessness. If the, a feeling of uselessness if they're unemployed, you know, if they've been fired or laid off.

[A]

Yeah, that's because. Yeah, that's because we're more status conscious, partly that.

[D]

But also I do think that women who have, who have dependent care responsibilities, it's not paid labor, but boy, are they needed. They feel very needed by that. But that's a very gendered kind of, you know, activity in America. Men find it hard to. Hard to get a sense of who they are and you know, through dependent care work.

[A]

But you're not arguing that we should or are you that we should work less or less hard?

[D]

Well, I do think Americans really need paid vacation.

[A]

Yeah. Yeah, okay, let's, okay, let's level set, let's, let's just level set and say that it is a crime against humanity that Americans are not guaranteed four weeks of paid vacation a year like everyone else in the developed world. Yeah, okay, okay. It's just, and it is nuts and by the way, terrible for the economy in addition to everything else.

[D]

Yes, it's awful.

[A]

Yeah. That we don't have that. But just stipulate for a moment that we got there that you could snap your fingers and all of a sudden Americans would be operating sort of at the global average of reasonable work hours and adequate vacation and so on and so forth. Look, I don't mean to oversimplify, but, or stereotype too harshly, but the difference between a hard driving American and an Italian who takes more time and enjoys their life and so on and so forth, these are very different ways of approaching life. Right?

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

Are you arguing that the Italian way is better than the American way?

[B]

Are you arguing that the Scandinavian way is better than the American way?

[D]

I think that's closer, yes. So one of the things I argue is that social democracy is actually the culmination of this pro worker work ethic that we can see actually existing in Scandinavian countries primarily, but other social democracies too, the Netherlands for instance.

[A]

I mean, one of the things that I think is so important and interesting about your argument is that one of the good things about a more advanced civilization like the one that we have in a highly advanced technological capitalist economy, is that it has made a greater and greater proportion of jobs pretty easy to attribute meaning to. So one of the reasons that Goldie lives for work is that our work is so interesting and fun. Right. Like it just.

[D]

Oh, I can relate. Totally.

[A]

Yeah. Yeah. You know, like it just is an incredible blessing to get to do what we do every day. And in particular, if you care about having impact, to do what we do. And you know, 200 years ago there might have been 1% of humans on earth that could make a claim like that, that they had a, that they had work that felt meaningful in that way.

[D]

I'm not so sure. I think more, but.

[A]

You think more? Well, you know, here's, here's the thing is that when people were yeoman farmers and, and craftspeople, that's a different situation. Right. But I'm thinking about the Industrial revolution, you know, where huge numbers of people are either starving in the fields or slaving in the, in the factories and there are some rich landowners and drudgery.

[D]

Boring stuff.

[A]

Horrible.

[D]

Yes.

[A]

Dangerous.

[D]

Yeah. Right, right.

[A]

Okay. That's what's in my head.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

Is it? In that world, 1% of people are feeling like life is great and interesting and. And dignified and meaningful. And everybody else is like, oh, kill me now. Right. So certainly there are lots and lots and lots of people in the advanced societies who still have crappy jobs. But everyone, you know, Elizabeth has a great one. Right.

[D]

You know, it's a really interesting thing. So.

[A]

Right.

[D]

What by. Well, let's put this way. There's the content of the labor. So if you're, you know, in the. Broadly. In the professional managerial class.

[A]

Yeah.

[D]

Or doing things like, you know, acting, performance arts, this kind of stuff. Yes. Your job is endlessly interesting, and it's also fulfilling in the sense that it enables you to exercise pretty sophisticated talents. And most people really enjoy that. Yeah, it's fulfilling. It's meaningful. And you also get recognition back, you know, if you do your job well. And that's also huge. So, yeah, these kinds of jobs are really great. But here's the thing. You might have noticed a while ago, the Washington Post published a survey that gathered from data from the Department of Labor on the happiest and most miserable workers.

[A]

Yep.

[D]

The happiest workers were lumberjacks. Do you remember that?

[A]

I didn't see that.

[D]

Now you have to give credit to lumberjacks, though. That's actually pretty sophisticated labor. I mean. Yeah, it's really hard to down a tree safely.

[B]

It is, yeah. So Monty Python had some insight there, as usual.

[D]

Correct. But not just lumberjacks. It was like, farmers are on top fishers. But again, these are actually quite highly skilled jobs. And you're outdoors. It's refreshing. You're with nature. There's a lot of nice things about that. Whereas, believe it or not, one of the lowest ranked in terms of work satisfaction was the professional class. Professionals and scientists. What's going on there?

[B]

Scientists.

[A]

Really?

[D]

Yeah. And I think I actually have a section in my book on the proletarianization of the professional classes. And I know this from my husband, who's a. He's in internal medicine, but he works for one of these giant sprawling healthcare organizations with dozens of clinics and hospitals and so forth. And, you know, he loves the content of his work. That is his core duties of taking care of patients. He would do this endlessly. He loves every minute of it. But he's locked into a system that drives him absolutely insane. You know, I'll just give you an example. He'll open up his electronic patient records, which are optimized not for giving you precisely the information you need to take care of patients.

[A]

Let me get information.

[D]

Yeah. Why don't you guess it?

[A]

Insurance coding.

[D]

Well, there's coding. It's all about maximizing billing profit. He now gets. You know, used to be he'd open up the records, he'd get red flags about, you know, some lab result or something. Now he gets red flags because some AI is alerting to him to the possibility that maybe he has undercoated and if he revised the entry, they could make more money, bill more for his services. It drives him crazy. He hates it. He has mandatory seminars he has to attend on how to upcode.

[A]

Oh, Jesus.

[B]

So, Elizabeth, I think I have an example that might be even closer to home for you, and that is as fulfilling as your job is. Imagine if instead of being a tenured professor, you were an adjunct.

[D]

Absolutely. That's part of. Yes.

[B]

Yeah. You're teaching the exact same material, but poorly paid, with no job security whatsoever.

[D]

Correct. And also what that means, as we've seen more and more frequently, is that without job security, and let's keep in mind these adjunct professors, they are teaching more than half, I think might even be around 70% of all student credit hours, something like that.

[B]

Yeah, that's the number.

[D]

And they're. They're actually paid. If you actually count up the hours, they're paid well below minimum wage.

[A]

Wow.

[D]

Because it's not just the hours of the classroom. There's also all the hours in preparation and grading papers and all kinds of other things.

[A]

Right.

[B]

So this is a way. Neoliberalism, with its distorted version of the work ethic has turned a great job into a terrible job.

[D]

Absolute drudgery, because you basically have to teach so many courses, you run ragged in order to survive.

[B]

And you see this increasingly throughout the economy. So I'm just trying to get back to the current day practical impact of how neoliberalism has used the conservative work ethic to really make this a terrible economy for the vast majority of workers.

[D]

Yeah. It's about proletarianizing everybody. Right. Turning everyone into a drudge like they managed to do during the Industrial Revolution.

[B]

And at the same time, because it rewards extractive work, which is something that the Puritan theologians wouldn't have approved of because essentially it values your worth in the money you earn, we actually have a less productive and less innovative economy than we otherwise would have with a more progressive work ethic.

[D]

Absolutely. And in academics in particular, one of the key things that is taken away from adjunct instructors is autonomy. Over their teaching. Right. Because now you say something that the higher administration doesn't like or that provokes controversy and suddenly your contract isn't renewed. You're effectively fired. Because adjuncts often live on a semester by semester contract.

[A]

Wow. So given all this, a, did you think it was pretty awesome that President Biden went and did the picket lines with the UAW workers?

[D]

Absolutely. Historical and high time, you know.

[A]

God, no kidding. Isn't that just the greatest damn thing ever?

[D]

Absolutely.

[A]

That is so cool.

[B]

What I thought was historical, Nick, were the headlines, the pundits, whatever. Just the critics who are just, oh, how could he do this? This is unprecedented. Unprecedented for a president to take sides in a labor dispute as if we've never had a president that violates norms.

[A]

Yeah, this is the norm.

[B]

This is the norm that you're upset about. You're taking sides in a labor dispute.

[A]

Can we turn to what we should do? What's your prescription for the future? How do we get out from. From under this problem?

[D]

Yeah. So look, I do think that job number one is empowering workers. And that means in the American context, I actually think we need to reform the law of labor unions in this country, because right now the law has been rigged to make it almost impossible to organize. Whereas if you look over in Europe, you have things like sectoral bargaining where union workers can bargain on behalf of all workers, whether they belong to a union or not, across whole sectors of industry. That's an ambitious reach for us. But I do think reforming labor law would be a critical way to expand the power of unions.

[B]

Yeah. You point out that the, that private sector union membership isn't much higher in France, but the French unions are negotiating on behalf of non union workers.

[D]

That's correct. Yes. And you see this across the Scandinavian countries as well. Very broad union power.

[A]

Yeah, but what's the idea that we should hold in our head when we think about work?

[D]

Workers need to be honored for the job they do, but also we need to focus on making that work more meaningful, like actually useful and not just extractive or assisting capitalists in. Right. Extracting wealth from everybody else.

[A]

The quickest way to do that, of course, is to pay people more, which forces you to make the work meaningful.

[D]

Well, it's complicated though, because, you know, I have to say I'm pretty skeptical. If you look at, say, where elite universities are sending their graduates, it's to the worst places. Fortunately, it's in consulting and finance. I'm talking about the really elite places. If they're not going into the Professions, they're going into consulting and finance, and both of those are kind of problematic industries.

[A]

Yes. Totally extractive. Yeah, yeah. No, it's really true. And they're very highly compensated, obviously, so. Yeah. If there's one thing we know, it's that the amount of money you earn is. Does not. Does not reflect your social value.

[D]

Right. And. But in fact, that's part of our, I think, perverted work ethic ideology in America, is to think that how much you make is a sign of how much. How much you have, you know, are paid is a sign of how much you've contributed to society. It's just wrong.

[A]

Yeah, that's not true.

[B]

You use a term in the book which I loved, the economy of esteem. You argue that that needs to change.

[D]

Absolutely. That means workers need to be honored. And, you know, you had just had Michael Sandel on. Right. And he's saying the same thing. It's very important.

[A]

100%. 100%. Yeah. This is a central argument in his. In his last book, which is that, you know, we have turned all this stuff upside down in a really pernicious way.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

Okay, so a couple of final questions. Our benevolent dictator question. If you were in charge and had no political constraints, what would you do?

[D]

Well, I'm actually a pragmatist in the Dewey tradition. And so I'm. I'm a deep believer in experience, experimentation, social experimentation. But do we always connect that to deepening democracy? This is collective experimentation where ordinary people take stage front and center. And that requires democratizing work. So I would want to have workers have much greater say in how work is organized, really perform democratic functions. There's ways to do that through works councils, co determination, where workers sit on the board. And that active practice of collective autonomy in a kind of participatory form in the workplace can also help reinforce democracy at large in various government units and hopefully help us overcome the temptations towards authoritarianism that we're seeing in many of the democracies today, especially the United States.

[A]

Yeah, interesting.

[D]

And that, of course, was core to the original social democratic vision.

[A]

Yeah, absolutely.

[D]

It was about democracy, not just about a welfare state or about passively receiving stuff from the government that was very much about empowering people by deepening democracy across domains of life.

[B]

Is there any hope for that in the United States? Because our work ethic is so. Even repeatedly, so counter to experience to the empirical evidence. I'm thinking back to as we were coming out of the pandemic restrictions, all this angst over the great resignation and quiet Quitting that somehow by giving people money to keep them from starving or becoming homeless, people would not go back to work. And of course, that all turned out to not to be true. That we have a very low unemployment right now and very high levels of workforce participation, higher than we had before the pandemic. And yet it doesn't seem to change minds. We still have this punitive attitude towards the working poor. Not just the poor, but the working poor that somehow it's their fault. And that seems just so grounded in what we understand to be the puritan ethic that your lot in this world is basically a sign of your grace before God.

[D]

Oh, I think I agree with you that that picture is deeply embedded in many Americans consciousness. But it's, it's just grounded on a fundamental error. And a lot of it is that Americans don't really think structurally and are very resistant to thinking about how outcomes are dictated far more by structures of opportunity than they are by, you know, individual effort or merit. So the way, you know, I think the easiest way to think about this is, you know, a ladder. So you have each rung designates an amount of pay, okay, that you might get in different occupations. And the structure of that ladder has nothing to do with your particular efforts. Right. Like the distance between the rungs or the distance between the top rung and the bottom rung, which would be a measure of inequal. None of those things has anything to do with your individual efforts. And what we've seen under neoliberalism, with increasing inequality, it's kind of like making the ladder massively taller and also ripping out a lot of the middle rungs so that most people end up way at the bottom with a huge gap between them and the people at the tippy top. But that is something to do with their efforts or lack of effort. It has to do with who got to build the ladder in the first place, who had the ear of the lobbyist to rig the rules so as, for instance, to dismantle the effectiveness of antitrust law so that the monopolies can just rake in more and more profits just because they're a monopoly.

[B]

But in the same way that I have internalized the asceticism of the work ethic, it strikes me that most Americans and the ones suffering under it the most have internalized the rewards side of it. They think. I mean, I think that's where you see a lot of the deaths of despair coming from. People believe it is their own fault. And I just don't know how you get all those people masked at the bottom of the ladder to change the way they view the world and view themselves.

[D]

You know, I think Americans are coming to see the system is rigged against them.

[A]

Yeah. I think young people are not buying.

[D]

It, but even a lot of older people are seeing something's not right here.

[A]

Yeah, right.

[D]

I think we've reached peak neoliberalism in terms of ideology, and it's on its.

[A]

Decline, that's for sure.

[B]

I think, Elizabeth, this explains also our current neoliberal push for STEM education, that we don't want young people to be taking philosophy classes.

[A]

Too dangerous. Get back to the coding. Get back to the code. Don't.

[D]

Well, you know, but now we have AI who's coding, so, I mean, how many low level code they got to keep their jobs? I'm not so sure.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

What we need to do is train the AI on philosophy, since they're the ones that are going to be running the world. So, Nick, do we want to get to the final question? And if so, I think it has. I don't think we've ever had an interview where it is more on point. Do you want to ask it, Nick.

[A]

Why do you do this work?

[D]

Why do I do this work?

[A]

Yes, ma'.

[D]

Am.

[B]

Yeah. Be consistent here with your book.

[D]

Yeah, yeah. Well, philosophers, like political philosophers, want to basically enable people to understand the path in order both to recognize the ways in which we've gone wrong, but also to provide resources for thinking about how to make the world better. In uncovering this tradition of the work ethic, I think I'm doing both things. One, showing how the work ethic in part originated from some pretty problematic ideas which we've carried with us without justification, but then in another part actually has major resources for uplifting the status of workers and for creatively thinking about how to make our work lives better. And so that's what gives me meaning in life, is, you know, I'm supplying ideas for people that I hope can help us remake the world in better ways.

[A]

It's a perfect answer to a very hard question.

[B]

Yeah, I think. I think you may have just. That would be my answer too, Nick. Yeah, well, it's not my. Not my only answer, Nick. Also, I. I like to win.

[A]

I know, but. I know. Well, thank you so much for being with us again. It's always so great to talk to you.

[D]

Oh, it's such a pleasure to be on your show.

[A]

It's such an interesting conversation and it, you know, such an interesting book and it really does force people like you and Me, who definitely have that Protestant work ethic. Right. Like we're hardcore. But it does. It's such an interesting issue of how to think about work and how to situate it in our lives and how to situate work in the broader economy. Even the term work ethic is complex. And I'm still thinking about it, just how it intersects with the social contract and how our relationship to work should be vis a vis other people and the rest of the economy. These very complicated and interesting things.

[B]

Well, you know, I'll tell you again, and I tried to come back to it a bit and it's hard, I think, for people to imagine, oh, you're talking to a philosopher. Good for you. You can afford the time to do that. What does that mean for my life? And I think back. She points out in the book that the first half of the 19th century in Britain as the most horrible part of the Industrial revolution, the most immiserating part of it in that first half. Wages stagnated or fell during the first half of the 19th century, even as productivity grew faster than at any time in human history. Productivity just took off with industrialization and workers saw the. None of that, that 50 year period. It wasn't until the second half of the 19th century when workers started to organize that you started to see gains for workers. Sound familiar, Nick? A 50 year period where productivity grew and workers saw none of it, none of the gains from it. The vast majority of people. And we were told, oh, that's cause you're unskilled. There's a skills gap, there's an education gap, go learn, Ste. It's a very similar period of time and it is the result of social norms and ways of thinking about society and the economy and one's own place within it. I think that, as I said, I express some skepticism that we can change the American mindset because it is so deeply ingrained. But this is something we've talked about a lot on the podcast over the past few years, Nick, that we, we can't change the economy without changing the way we think and talk about the economy.

[A]

Yeah. And I do, but I do think that there's an opening today. I think that it's so clear to so many people that the game is rigged and that they're not working for themselves. They're working for some distant plutocratic overlord, as you like to say. Yeah. And that doesn't make very much sense. Again, you know, as I said in the interview, the President of the United States picketing with workers like that's a moment, right? That's a moment. And you know, I just think it says a lot about the changing zeitgeist and hopefully the pendulum is swinging in a different direction today.

[B]

It's interesting how things coincide. It's also the day that his administration has brought an antitrust suit against Amazon.com yeah, your old friend Jeff and his monopoly. And that shows a very different way of thinking about the economy and the role of the power of capital within it to do what it pleases.

[A]

Yep, absolutely. Well, always so fun to talk to.

[B]

Elizabeth Anderson we highly recommend the book. It is called How Neoliberalism Turned the Work Ethic Against Workers and How Workers Can Take It Back. It just came out this week, last week as the time we're recording it a couple weeks ago by the time you hear this, so we urge you to get a copy at your local independent bookstore or at the target of a federal anti trust suit if that's what works better for you.

[C]

Pitchfork Economics is produced by Civic Ventures. If you like the show, make sure to follow, rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Find us on other platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and threads. Itchfork Economics Nick's on on Twitter and Facebook as well. Ickhanhower for more content from us, you can subscribe to our weekly newsletter, the Pitch over on Substack, and for links to everything we just mentioned plus transcripts and more, visit our website, Pitchfork economics.com as always from our team at Civic Ventures, thanks for listening. See you next week.