"In the Name of Love" challenges our current "do what you love" mantra regarding work, arguing that a) this privileged perspective dehumanizes the vast majority of people who do our necessary but generally unlovable work, and b) enables the capitalist system to exploit workers by leveraging the passion-means-more-than-compensation ethos. The author also notes how this dynamic particularly harms women:
"Yet another damaging consequence of DWYL is how ruthlessly it works to extract female labor for little or no compensation. Women comprise the majority of the low-wage or unpaid workforce; as care workers, adjunct faculty, and unpaid interns, they outnumber men. What unites all of this work, whether performed by GEDs or PhDs, is the belief that wages shouldn’t be the primary motivation for doing it. Women are supposed to do work because they are natural nurturers and are eager to please; after all they’ve been doing uncompensated childcare, elder care, and housework since time immemorial. And talking money is unladylike anyway."
I will admit to being shocked by this revelation at first. I guess I'd bought into the Do What You Love thing just like everyone else. My next reaction was rage. A system of oppression exploiting mankind's hope for self-fulfillment as a sort of Trojan Horse?! Finally, I sink back into depression. Has there ever been a self-help movement that wasn't exploitative or exploited to benefit the privileged?
Be vigilant my friends.
I disagree. I don't see the attitude of "do what you love" to be inherently discriminatory. As I understand it, the thesis of the passage above is that what women are "suggested" to do or are interested in doing is low paying work. Somehow I don't really see enough evidence to support that.
ReplyDeleteI think "do-what you want" motivation is good for both male and females alike. I think more jobs should not be motivated mostly by compensation... compensation should be the reward or the means to complete an alternative project.
Finally, I feel like do what you love is liberating for women (like it is for men). Want to be an architect? Work towards that. Want to be a home Gardner? Do that. How does encouraging women to strive for their passions anti-feminist?
Perhaps you are suggesting that women should be properly compensated for their work, but I don't see that contradicting this DWYL idea.
What should women be striving for instead?
The article presents some broader societal arguments that I probably should have detailed before jumping to the end. Here is my take on the article’s thesis:
ReplyDeleteFor many decades, it was completely acceptable to have a job you weren’t “passionate” about but that you did with honor and were paid enough (with a reasonable work-life balance) that you could pursue your passions on the side. Work was not necessarily self-fulfilling but it was respectable and it enabled your hobbies. However, that world is long gone, real wages are declining, people work long hours just to make ends meet, and in the age of Wall Street billions, ordinary work and workers are disdained.
Within this environment, a small number of entrepreneurs have successfully turned their passions into vastly successful brands (Steve Jobs, Oprah, etc.). We also hear stories of people quitting their jobs to write hit blogs. These people, asked for career advice, say “do what you love.” However, there are two problems with this. First, there is massive selection bias in the DWYL narrative since we only hear about the relatively small percentage of successful cases. Second, DWYL (as career advice, not for hobbies or volunteer work on the side) is a privileged perspective, a luxury available almost exclusively to people with means and connections. You probably won’t get that breakthrough fashion magazine internship if you have a mountain of student debt, two kids to feed, and a mother on dialysis.
As a result, DWYL career advice allows the privileged classes to feel good about their lives without doing anything for the vast numbers of people who support their dreams. We have always needed people to do unlovable labor and always will. An economy based solely on DWYL careers does nothing for the legions of trash collectors, grocery store clerks, and office cleaners that make our world go round.
The author takes the critique one step further, arguing that DWYL allows the capitalist system to profit further at the expense of workers and/or justify discriminatory practices. If you are doing what you love, you must be getting huge personal benefits for doing so: self-fulfillment, warm-fuzzy feelings, etc. This isn’t an entirely new idea; public servants and people working in the non-profit world have accepted lower wages than the private sector for years. However, the author argues that the dynamic is getting worse, noting the new legions of interns and adjunct professors theoretically doing what they love in return for very limited compensation.
The argument about women stems from this point. Jobs that women perform in large numbers have never paid well. Think teaching, nursing, childcare, cleaning, administrative work, etc. In the modern world, you’d think we’d have fixed that by now. Instead, DWYL subtly gives new life to the status quo. Women love to take care of people; it’s self-fulfilling for them. Teachers and nurses are doing what they love. As a result, it’s okay that we don’t compensate them to reflect the vast societal benefits they provide.
I think the logic also harms non-career workers as well. In the DWYL world, any labor you do just for the pay must be temporary, right? Since your job at McDonalds is just temporary until you start your vastly successful new business, we don’t need to make that labor bearable or fairly compensated. No need to pay your cleaning lady any more than you have to, because she won’t be cleaning your toilet once she becomes a partner at a leading architecture firm.
That’s the thrust of the article. There is nothing wrong with aspirations, self-fulfillment, and broader motivations. If you have the means to DWYL, by all means do so. However, don’t forget about all the people who cannot, and let’s not allow DWYL to justify inadequate compensation for valuable, if unlovable work.
I think I agree with some of the points you've mentioned above, but I get this undercurrent vibe that "poor people shouldn't do what they would really want because they don't have means. Therefore, its unfair to encourage that because they have less opportunity than others."
ReplyDeleteI think quite the opposite. I think we should encourage those with less opportunity to pursue their passion (whether it is career, hobby, or self improvement related) because they deserve that attitude as much as anybody else. I'd like to make the world a place where I can say you should DWYL and I'd like to support you to get there.
Maybe I am being supportive of it because I have good intentions, but your posts bring up how it can also be manipulated and leave groups to be taken advantage of.
I get what Morghan is saying . . . people without resources often cannot just DWYL. It's stupid and kinda disrespectful and definitely unhelpful to keep telling them that's the penultimate way of living and evaluating your life choices. Someone recently asked Ava DuVernay a question like this (should I abandon my practical career path for art? sorta thing), and she gave a much better answer as someone who isn't wealthy and didnt/doesn't have tons of rich connections to tap into . . she basically said try it out, start small, dabble. But the general (white) cultural narrative is completely extreme: drop out of college! quit your job! travel to the hinterlands of whereever! invest all your money in a niche, designer craft that you know nothing about but have passion for! . . . That's ridiculous advice to give a poor or minority person from a very privileged perspective! . . . I do think that compensation should not be the end all be all, but we do tend to devalue (and therefore under-compensate) work that is done my women or racial groups because we just assume doing care work or grunt work comes naturally to them and since they are lowly it's not important work . . . when it actually is vital work! The DWYL rhetoric doesn't leave a lot of room for other perspectives on labor and sets a very narrow standard for whether you are actually being successful at DWLing.
ReplyDeleteI wrote too early . . . http://theawkwardyeti.com/comic/experiences/
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