Another way to ask the question is, “Do you take work home with you?”
Next Monday is Labor Day, a day set aside by the Federal Government in 1894 as a national holiday to recognize the millions of Americans who worked long hours just to live and to give them a well-deserved day off.
Before the Industrial Revolution, most people made their living by farming. They worked long, hard hours, but except for sharecroppers, farm families worked for themselves.
Former slaves and immigrants did not have the capital to buy land for a farm, so they moved to cities in the north like Chicago and found work in the stockyards and factories created by the Industrial Revolution.
The website Investopedia explains, “Working conditions in the country’s factories, railroads, mills, and mines were grim. Employees, including children, were often required to work 12 or more hours a day, six days a week, in crowded, poorly ventilated spaces.”
Progressive legislation has reduced the required norm to five days a week and eight hours a day. Labor Day was created for people who work to live.
Conditions have improved for blue collar workers, but Dolly Parton’s famous song expresses why many folks who do manual labor still may feel exploited.
Nine to five, yeah, they got you where they want you
There’s a better life and you think about it don’t you
It’s a rich man’s game no matter what they call it
And you spend your life puttin’ money in his wallet [instead of yours]
What’s interesting is that there are hundreds of men and women who live and/or work in Forest Park who voluntarily “take their work home with them,” who work 60 or more hours a week even though they no longer have to in order to feed their families. They tend to be well educated and have professions — bankers, accountants, lawyers — which pay a lot more than they need to just survive.
Some commentators these days refer to these types as “extreme workers,” folks who in one way or another “live to work.”
My life may explain some of the reasons people live to work.
I never took work home from the first four jobs I had between the ages of 16 and 22 — at a fast food restaurant, at a supermarket, at a warehouse where I unloaded and loaded 100 pound bags for 10 hours a day, and on a railroad section crew where four of us would replace thousand-pound rails by hand and drive spikes into ties with a spike maul.
I punched out on the time clock from all those jobs exactly at quitting time. Those jobs did not define who I was. They were what I did to earn money to go to college.
I earned $1.10 an hour, which was the minimum wage back then, at the fast food place. I earned $3 an hour on the section crew. The difference was that I belonged to a union when I worked for the Soo Line Railroad. I still worked for “the man” but my union at least helped narrow the income gap.
At the age of 32 my life turned a corner. I no longer worked for “someone else.” I had earned three university degrees, got ordained, and was called by a congregation to be its pastor. I pivoted from being a follower to being a leader. Instead of doing one thing repeatedly all day long, no two days were ever the same.
Before my ordination, the work I did was not part of my identity. After ordination, I was a pastor. Now the work I did became part of who I was, and I worked 60 hours a week as if my life depended on it.
My wife once said to me, “I feel like you are having an affair, not with another woman but with the church. That’s where you put most of your time and energy. The kids and I get the leftovers.”
I once got into a conversation with a CEO of Goldman Sachs who was worth millions of dollars. When asked why he didn’t retire and enjoy a life of leisure, he replied, “That’s how we keep score.”
That is, work is not just a way to put food on the table and a roof over the family’s heads but is a game in which your compensation determines if you win or lose in the identity Olympics.
We live at a time when the work we do has the possibility of humanizing us instead of simply wearing us down. But along with that blessing is a potential curse — the temptation to make more of work than it is able to give back.
It’s a temptation with which all business owners, professionals and clergy in town are familiar — finding the golden mean of balance between work, family, friends, self and a relationship with a higher power.