Each year the nation slows down to think about and commemorate labor and those who have worked to provide for themselves, their families, and the nation as a whole. We stop to think about the inherent nobility of the person who works to ensure that his/her needs and the needs of others are honestly provided for along with, possibly, some luxuries. We also think about the nobility of labor itself.

We work and that work gives us value and somehow attests to our inherent worth and value as human beings. From a Judeo-Christian perspective, work was originally a part of the curse God placed upon humankind and the ground because of disobedience to his commandment. The Book of Genesis states, "Cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life...and in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground."(Gen.3).

Whereas work was initially given as a curse, it seems that over the years, it obtained a certain godly nobility. For we see that the Apostle Paul, a major developer of New Testament teaching, stated that if a Christian does not work, he should not eat, and if he does not provide for his family, that Christian has denied the Christian faith and is worst than an infidel.(2Thes 3)

Now many philosophers and theologians argue that work connects human beings in some way back to God. To carry the Judeo-Christian analogy further, from the Book of Genesis, God worked when he created the heavens, the earth, and humankind. Genesis states, "And on the seventh day God ended his work...and He rested ...."  So when we work, we find a certain nobility in that work, some have argued, because we imitate God, we struggle for human perfectibility, and we find justification in our rest from that work, for "He rested." Work has become ennobling, almost essential to our identity and our worth. (Gen.3)

Work is firmly tied to our worth in western societies, often to our social status, and to our very identity. At first encounter of a new acquaintance, we frequently inquire about that person's work type. This may be partly for purposes of conversation, but there is much more to it than that.

As a society we have stratified ourselves into classes and types. Robert Reich argued in his Work of Nations, that work will become divided into two types--Person-to-Person services and Creative Service workers. We inquire of a person's work status and classification, and as a society we have quantified and qualified the various classes of work and measured each other by an almost tacitly agreed to variable tied to work type. So the American paradigm is that along with one's name must go his/her work type, if we are to know who that person is.

The almost universal ethos that work is noble has been reformulated in this nation. Work is honorable and ennobling, depending on the type of work one does. All work is noble we say, but certain types are viewed as more noble than others. And strangely the types we have selected as the most noble are not the teachers, social workers, nurses, street cleaners, child care workers, etc., but lawyers, bankers, corporate executives, singers, actors, etc.

Martin Luther King, Jr., once said that it does not make any difference what a person does, "If you are a dog catcher or a street sweeper, be the best that you can be because all work is noble." The writer W. H. Auden attempted to distinguish work from labor by saying that labor is when one engages in a job he finds no interest in but is compelled by necessity to work that job to support his family. Work, he stated, is when one engages a job, and he/she is personally interested in it and is paid for doing. In so defining, he implies a greater prestige to work than to labor. This type of distinction seems to be without a meaningful difference, other than it may be a superficial social standing given by virtue of a keenly defined employment position that one likes and enjoys and the other is of necessity and not enjoyed.

Nathaniel Brandon, The Importance of Self Esteem, writes that self esteem is the most important attribute that shapes our behavior. Yet society has given credence to the importance of who one is by what he/she does for a living. As a result, in this current society, our job lives have become a major and almost demanded ingredient of our identities.

Some years ago,  in order to place two staff persons who had been ejected from their offices, I moved a staff person out of an office she had occupied alone. That move was extremely troubling to her, causing psychological problems, or so she claimed. I saw it merely as an administrative decision that was based on an urgent necessity; she saw it as a diminution of her personal worth. Her identity was tied to her position at that particular place of employment, and her private office was a part of her identity.

For many, their identities are abnormally intertwined with their jobs--jobs at which they are only employees, subject to the whims and caprices of others and to circumstances which they have no or little control over. Yet they/we behave toward one another differently because of positions of employment temporarily held. This is understandable to some extent, but the extent to which many Americans carry it is abnormal.

Some years ago, I traveled to Los Angeles one early morning for a conference; I attempted to have a conversation with a person I felt was also going to that conference. She was discourteous and rude; I did not pursue the conversation but sought my answers elsewhere. As I talked with others, my name was called aloud by someone who knew me. The previously discourteous person, upon recognizing who I was, that is, the job position I held, came to me and tried to explain her rude response to my inquiry. Of course, this newfound need to be nice was the result of the job position I held, not because of who I was without that position. To her, my identity was tied to that job, and without the job, I was of less or no worth.

This type of worth-by-job-held may be a form of psychosis that has bred, in part, some of the job-termination-killings that have transpired in America. The tragedy these killers face is twofold: 1.) they have been fired and may not have the financial ability to provide for basic necessities or their certain lifestyle, and  2.) they feel they have lost all personal worth and identity; hence they have no reason to live because they are a non-person. And when one has no perceived reason to live, he/she may do anything. The job-related and school-related mass killings may be acts of desperation by psychotic men; women are just starting to make their presence felt in this area. This could be because women have lived with this non-person status for many years and have learned other ways to assert themselves into personhood.

Honest labor is noble, and those who involve themselves in the process are of worth and honorable. But one's identity should not be tied to a position held temporarily because all positions of employment are only temporary at best, and if an agency has to downsize or cut staff for some other reason, the person laid off or terminated may have serious adjustment problems. There is so much more to the human spirit than what one does or does not do for a living; to overlook those other and very important aspects of oneself is an oversight that is harmful.

Most of the time work should and does make us feel good about ourselves; still we are more than our jobs. To see ourselves and our identities tied so inextricably to our jobs is to allow others to have more control over our lives and identities rather than we have. Such a deference of personal power will breed desperate men and psychotic behavior. Human beings in America are often trapped in a Job-identity paradigm that works to their harm when their jobs are not highly rated by a fickle society. That strange approach to seeing each other should be resisted, and we must struggle to  identify ourselves by more profound and lasting virtues and qualities. 

There are various ways one sees his/her identity, as Michael Eric Dyson delineates in his brilliantly written book, "Is Bill Cosby Right, or has the Middle Class Lost its Mind?" We must go beyond work (what we do to earn a living) to define who we are. And we must refuse to allow others to define our identity by those narrow constructs as well.

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Frank A. Jones
9.5.05

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