Heather Cox Richardson:

From Cafe and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Now & Then. I’m Heather Cox Richardson.

Joanne Freeman:

And I’m Joanne Freeman. Today we’re going to be talking about a topic that was raised by what some people are calling the great resignation, and by that they mean the fact that people appear to be leaving their jobs in great and even ever increasing numbers. Some new data from the labor department actually confirms a trend that took hold during the pandemic that some, apparently, 4.3 million people quit their jobs just in August, about 2.9% of the workforce, and those numbers are up from previous months. We began to talk about what does work mean to us in our lives and what has it meant over time? How does work shape our sense of ourselves? How has that changed over time? What do we think about our work time versus our leisure time? And what can this tell us about how really fundamentally life and work have changed in the United States over the last two centuries?

Heather Cox Richardson:

And one of the things that really interested me about this topic in this particular moment is that last summer, when the federal government was providing enhanced unemployment insurance benefits, there was a lot of complaint around the country that somehow this was keeping people from working, they had this extra money and that they were being paid not to work, so they weren’t going to show up to work. And what was interesting about that is when those extra payments stopped, it didn’t change how many people were in the workforce. So there’s clearly something else going on, and it might be a number of different things, but that got us thinking about the culture of work and what it means in America to work, and has meant through time to work, and some of our favorite stories come from this, but I have to start, I think, by saying that this is a red letter podcast, because this is the first time that Joanna and I have been in a studio together.

Joanne Freeman:

I know, it’s shocking. We’re sitting across from each other.

Heather Cox Richardson:

It’s really weird.

Joanne Freeman:

It is totally weird, that’s totally true.

Heather Cox Richardson:

We’ll have to behave ourselves.

Joanne Freeman:

I know.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So if we’re in this moment where we’re redefining what work is, I think it starts back in your period, what does work mean to Americans, and how is that different than what it might have meant to people of other countries?

Joanne Freeman:

Well, one of the things, one of the values in early America that was pretty consistent, Really actually didn’t matter so much what your politics were, but what was highly valued was independence, personal independence, that you weren’t necessarily dependent on others. Now for some folks, I’m smiling because I’m now in the room with Heather and I’m about to say the words Thomas Jefferson, but Jefferson, particularly, didn’t like industry, didn’t like cities, because he thought that they were pits of dependents, that people were dependent on each other. Farmers were independent workers.

So personal independence in this early time of American history, some people probably actually took it for granted, but that was valued, that meant that you were independent and able to think for yourself, that’s part of why property and land ownership was tied up with the vote, because the assumption was if you owned land you’re an independent minded person who doesn’t rely on others for your own good, for your own money, for your own wellbeing, so you will be able to think on your own. So for a long time that’s really what it was assumed to be. Now obviously personal independence is going to get complicated as we slowly see the rise of industry.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, with the idea there that if you work for somebody else you might be behold to them and therefore you wouldn’t be able to participate in a democracy in the way that you ought to, because you couldn’t protect your own interests, you would have to do what somebody told you to do.

Joanne Freeman:

Correct.

Heather Cox Richardson:

But not to pick on Thomas Jefferson, because we don’t do that in this podcast.

Joanne Freeman:

You said that with a straight face.

Heather Cox Richardson:

One of the things that’s interesting to me about Jefferson and his emphasis on people working, and how important that is, is that of course he’s not doing the work on his plantations, and that brings up one of the interesting aspects of the meaning of work in America, and I emphasize that because one of the things I believe that the early Americans were concerned about was the idea that there might become a class that didn’t think it had to work, and so they tended to emphasize that they were hard workers, that they were farmers. And those early images of George Washington where it shows him out in the fields, George Washington was not out in the fields, was he?

Joanne Freeman:

Not working in the fields, no. I mean, at one point Jefferson writes in a letter, “I am a nail maker.” Well no, the enslaved people who are at Monticello are nail makers, but that’s happening on his plantation, so he frames it that way. So no, these people, particularly southern plantation owners, are not physically “slaving” in the field. You could say that merchants and men of business in some ways are working, but it’s an interesting thing about early America that on the one hand being a leisured class and not having to work has a certain panache to it. On the other hand, you really don’t want to be that person. And both of those things are there at the same time, I think, among the elite in early America.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I love your story of George Washington both riding out in his carriage with his livery and his matched horses, and then later on in the week making sure he’s just walking around the streets like any dude.

Joanne Freeman:

Oh yeah, every day at the same time in the afternoon he walks around in the streets, literally to prove that, as you put it, he’s just like every other dude, that he’s just a person, he can walk in the street, and he gets fan mail for that because the message of that is very clear. So yeah, it’s kind of a mixed message.

Heather Cox Richardson:

But work is very important to the early Americans as part of their identities as Americans in a democracy.

Joanne Freeman:

Right, that there is value to work, that people are on the one hand valuing some aspects of what appeared to them to be sophisticated in what an aristocrat might seem like, but Americans are not trying to duplicate what they see as an old world aristocratic non-working class.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And that being said, of course, we’re talking about the ideology of work, and the social construct of work, and left out of that are enslaved people, and women, and the people who are doing most of the work, actually.

Joanne Freeman:

Right.

Heather Cox Richardson:

But that construction of work is really what we’re talking about now, in this particular moment, is what does work mean as an American in this moment, but working through what it’s meant in the past I think maybe tells us a lot, because you’ve got this early construct, and then it’s going to change in the early republic.

Joanne Freeman:

It is indeed going to change, it’s going to change in the early part of the 19th century, and that’s partly because, and this won’t be a surprise, that’s when you begin to have infant industry, which become more than infant industry in a short amount of time. But when you have the rise of the famous Lowell mills in Massachusetts, which hired thousands of what came to be known as these Lowell mill girls, these are textile factories that employ large numbers of people, and they are what we would now recognize as industry.

So that brings about a number of different changes, on the one hand some of these Lowell girls, as they would’ve been called, some of them go there because they need to earn money for their families, to support people back home. Some of them go because they want some degree of independence or money of their own while they are there living on their own, the mills provided living arrangements for of them with some kind of matron who would watch out for them in their living arrangements, there was a 10 o’clock curfew, and men could not be part of these boarding houses, they were not on the premises, and they went to church, or they were supposed to go to church every week.

Heather Cox Richardson:

But imagine if you’re a farm girl in the 18-teens, and you could go to a dormitory, essentially, with a whole bunch of other girls around the same age as you, versus staying at home in the farm and milking this expletive cow, it doesn’t sound like such a bad deal.

Joanne Freeman:

Well precisely, and that’s the thing, is that there were other kinds of bonuses to that. There were apparently publications that the girls put out, their own publications. There was a lyceum that was put up that had lectures, I think you could see 25 lectures for 25 cents a year. There were all kinds of cultural activities going on that these girls were taking part of, these young women were taking part in, and that was a big plus. That was, as you’re suggesting here, Heather, all kinds of things that they didn’t necessarily have access to elsewhere.

So on the one hand you see a dramatic change in the way work is unfolding, you see these women who are getting a new understanding of themselves and who they are, and themselves as a group, that they’re now with all of these other women who are roughly the same age, so on the one hand that’s a new sense of themselves. On the other hand, they’re losing control of their time. They’re working in an industry, they’re expected to work 12, 14, 16 hour days, they are not independent in the running of their life, they’re independent around its edges. And so I think we’re going to see throughout this episode, happens so often in American history, work has its pros and its cons, and it’s the balance that shifts over time.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, one of the things I love about the mill girls, and we’ve talked about this, is that concept, when the mills really take off in the early 19th century, of what it means to work, because once you’ve got the rise of needing to get all people to show up at the factory at the same time, so that all the machinery goes to work at the same time, you need to have bells to start to get people to show up, the ringing of the bells in those bell towers, and then you get the rise of the idea that work depends on a clock, that you have to show up at a certain hour.

And I love that because if you think of about the way that we run our lives when we’re not showing up to punch a clock, you don’t say, “I’m going to bake this cake and it’s going to take me 18 minutes,” you just do it. You basically work more on a task system that is integrated within a community, within your family, maybe you take time out to dress the kid or to pull your child away from whatever he’s playing with.

Joanne Freeman:

Dangerous thing.

Heather Cox Richardson:

That’s right, exactly. And so things get done for sure, but they get done on your own schedule, on your own time. And with the idea of clocks, and of punching a clock, although they’re not going to actually have that machinery at the time, you get the idea rising that you’re only working if it’s done by a clock, and if you get paid in cash, which is a really different idea about the way we structure work and the way we structure our lives. And one of the things that the Lowell mills, I think, really do that illustrate this is that until the rise of the Lowell mills, the idea of an unmarried woman spinning, which has to happen all the time in a colonial home because-

Joanne Freeman:

I think I know where you’re heading, go right on.

Heather Cox Richardson:

That spinning, women just do it. You sit down, you have some extra time, you sit and you spin to produce thread, or to produce yarn, it can be made into clothes. It’s very time consuming, so people are doing it all the time, and this is something that young women do. And when you get the rise factories where you could do that for a paycheck, the idea of a spinster, somebody who is not married, becomes a pejorative term, as opposed to just it’s one of the things you do to help the household economy.

And that idea that, you and I were talking about this before we did this episode, nothing gets my hackles up more around the issue of work than when somebody says to somebody who is a stay at home parent, “Do you work?” Just highlights for me the idea that, if anybody has been a stay at home parent, they know that is the hardest job that it’s possible to do.

Joanne Freeman:

Think about the way in which what you’re describing here, both in that question, “Do you work as a stay-at-home mom?” Or the fact that what used to be assumed to be work suddenly, if you’re a spinster it’s pejorative that you’re doing this thing that others are being paid to do, think of the ways in which both of those things, in factories generally, and clocks, are divorcing people from the absolutely most natural thing that they can be doing. So before clocks and factories, it’s the seasons and the day, and the sun rising and setting, that decides when you’re doing things, or how you’re doing them, or how they’re supposed to be done.

Heather Cox Richardson:

But it also changes who those people are, because the household economy, before you have people working outside the house according to a clock, certainly people are in other people’s homes, and working as apprentices, or whatever, but the concept of the household economy that is based on the labor of the man, the woman, and the children all together changes dramatically when you suddenly peel off certain people and say, “You’re going to work in this factory, you’re going to work over here,” and the locus of what work is, and what family togetherness is, changes really dramatically.

Joanne Freeman:

You know that’s interesting, it just occurred to me that in some colonial homes, and actually even early national American homes, when a family, agrarian farming family, had daughters, that was considered to particularly high value because they would bring men to them, as a working family that was a way to bring more working hands to a farm before they branched off and had a home of their own, so even that is being peeled away from these early families and what used to be a reliable, predictable working household.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And I’m also about the fact that, the words we used to have for the passage of time, the country words, there are so many different words for evening, for example, because you didn’t do things according to a clock, so you would do things in an evening period, for which we had seven or eight different names, and of course now many of those are gone. It’s just making me think, I live on the water, and over the course of the year you can see the sun move back, because there’s nothing in between us and the horizon, and it’s something that, until I moved there, I’d never really realized that I can literally tell you where the sun will be in August versus where it will be in January. And if you’ve lived that way the whole time, you wouldn’t need a clock, you would say, “Oh, it’s getting to be time for us to think about planting potatoes,” which was a big thing in Maine. They planted a lot of potatoes.

But that brings up what happens with the rise of industrialization and the changes that that makes in American concepts of work, as not only the people like the Lowell mill girls. When workers in general go from being artisans who work in small shops in usually some sort of specialized industry, and by specialized I don’t mean that they were doing widgets, but rather that most Americans in the period before the Civil War worked in an industry that took raw materials and turned them into something saleable. But if you were, for example, somebody who was a shoemaker, or a candle maker, the shops tended to be very small, they tended to be shops where everybody knew each other, where you knew the guy in charge, where you probably went to church together, you probably drank together, if you drank. You knew each other, and that’s really going to change dramatically in the mid-19th century.

Joanne Freeman:

Right, and you’re saying you knew each other meaning you knew the person in charge of that small shop, and then also people who were making the same kinds of goods also had a sense of shared identity and shared craft and shared pride in the sorts of things that they were creating.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And there was a sense then, at least historians have argued, and certainly anecdotally, it seems to be born out, that there was much more of a continuing sense of communal work, that is if your husband was sick and you couldn’t show up to work, they understood that. That was like, “I know, he’s dying, so take your time,” or whatever. There was slack built into the system that helped to keep conditions relatively palatable, for white workers, and that’s going to be a really important transition that they go through. The same, of course, is not true for enslaved workers.

For 19th century white workers who go from small towns to working in these increasingly growing factories, there’s a critical question which does include the whole question of enslaved labor, and that’s the relationship of individuals to work, when work becomes extractive, as it is in the American south or in the American west, or is these large, highly capitalized, really big industries. And for the second half of the 19th century, or really from the 1850s on, when people are critiquing the use of labor in these highly capitalized professions where individual skill is far less important than simply showing up to put the glue on the box, or sew the seam, or feed the furnace, that’s going to change the way Americans think about the relationship between individuals and work employers and capital.

Joanne Freeman:

The word that is on the edge of my lip here is machine, in a sense you become, in several senses of that word, a part of a machine, a working machine, so that you are, and this sounds like such historian talk to say you are part of the capitalist system, but you are, you are becoming part of a routine of capital in which you are creating things, and your purpose, your importance, is that you are there doing your job in the way that it needs to get done, along with a lot of other people doing the precise same thing, in a reliable, predictable time-punched kind of a way.

Heather Cox Richardson:

But that changes people from being in control of their work and being able to feel pride into their work, into being exchangeable.

Joanne Freeman:

Right, and in some sense, potentially, anonymous.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And divorces the idea of individual ability and individual input from the outcome, and that’s something in the middle of the 19th century that lots of people are struggling with. I mean, we talk a lot about Karl Marx and wondering about the relationship between individuals and production, who owns the means of production, and who is responsible for the value and labor, all those things, but he’s only one of many people who are wondering what it means to turn human production into these large scale enterprises. I mean, Abraham Lincoln was one of those, who spends a lot of time wondering about, what does it mean when all of a sudden one person can be exchanged for another person and it doesn’t really matter who they are pushing that particular lever?

Joanne Freeman:

So there’s a change in how people understand their own importance, there’s a change in how people are understanding their work with the rise of industry, there’s a change in that sense of how others understand the significance and importance of individuals and that people are exchangeable. So already, from the place where we began this conversation, there’s a vast change between individuals feeling personally independent and taking their work, to moving into these situations where they’re increasingly giving up power and independence and individuality. In a sense that sounds very modern to us, that we’re heading into modern territory. How does that trajectory move forward?

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well actually that’s a really interesting observation, because I’m sitting over here thinking that, to take it from the position not from the actual workers, but from the people who become known as capitalists, and I think even the enslavers before the Civil War, what those people who are in charge of commanding work begin to say is that the individual workers doesn’t matter, what matters is that the individual workers produce so much that we can amass that money and move the entire country forward. So yes, we’re going to have to break a few eggs, but isn’t the omelet yummy? Of course the workers see it very differently, and pretty quickly after the Civil War they begin to say, first of all, that they want to have more control over their wages and over their hours and over their conditions, and they begin to argue for limits to how long a person could work. So it’s actually Grant in ’69, 1869, who signs an order that the federal government will not work anybody longer than eight hours a day.

Joanne Freeman:

What’s interesting too is that kind of an awareness, and that kind of resistance happens, as you’re suggesting, later in the 19th century, but what struck me in reading and preparing for this episode was the discovery that in the early 19th century, in these very early industries, these textile mills in Massachusetts, even there you had early labor organization and early protest and early petitioning about hours being too long, and their workers wanting some limit to the hours. So at a very early point, when you bring all these people together, and you together get a sense of what they’re being asked to do, that sense of community, I think, drives people to understand the price of what they’re doing, and to have the power and the impetus to make a demand about it.

Heather Cox Richardson:

But that goes back to what you were saying about work being about who you are, not just what you do, but who you are, and it being an object of self-identity, self-determination, that you have the right to first, perhaps, to have some control over your work, but second of all, to be able to limit the hours that somebody else can command of you. And the idea of only working eight hours a day is radical at the time, it’s part of the eight hour movement.

When the government first starts to keep statistics in 1890 about how long people are working, they discover that in industries people are actually working 100 hour work weeks. 100 hours. Now they’re working seven days a week usually. I mean, think about what that looks like. 100 hours. What that means then is that those individuals have been reduced to simply machines. They have no time to do anything but work and sleep, and they probably are even eating on the job. So that concept of reducing the human being to a machine in order to move industry forward, in order to make more money, in order to move the country forward, has really reached a peak in the 1890s.

Joanne Freeman:

Right. Here we’re talking about individuals being made mechanized, part of a system, so that their individuality is being stamped out, but then looking a little bit further ahead-

Heather Cox Richardson:

I’m so sorry, I just have to say, it just occurred to me, the tin man, of course, from The Wizard of Oz.

Joanne Freeman:

From The Wizard of Oz.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Who was quite deliberately written to be a worker who has been mechanized.

Joanne Freeman:

Truly mechanized.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Yeah.

Joanne Freeman:

And doesn’t have a heart.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Yes, but he does really.

Joanne Freeman:

Yeah.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And he’s about to find it, in about 30 seconds, I think, from the look on your face.

Joanne Freeman:

Well, I was about to gesture towards a different kind of sense of work, a different kind of importance, a different kind of goal on the part of workers that comes up when we’re moving ahead into the 20th century, and it’s not surprising, given everything here, Heather, that you and I are talking about, the climate of work, and about the nature of being a worker in that climate, hardly surprising that strikes go off the charts, as far as the number of strikes happening. It makes perfect sense. You have a bunch of people, it’s the downside for employers that when they bring that many employees together they have a group identity and can together understand if they’re being abused and can take action and go on strike, so it makes perfect sense. That really becomes a common phenomenon when you’re getting to the end of the 19th century.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And that period is just absolutely characterized by strikes, and by very high turnover for workers, who in the early 20th century reached back to the Lowell mill girls, and the concepts of Lowell where the idea was that the employers were going to be paternalistic and provide this great system for their workers, and in the early 20th century in America we get the idea of welfare capitalism taking off, with the idea that if employers created a better system for the workers, they’d stop organizing, they’d stop being unionized, they’d stop striking. And so in 1914 you get Henry Ford introducing a $5 a day pay scale, which is a huge jump for a lot of people, and you get this idea of company baseball teams, and company picnics, and the idea that somehow that you will in fact be handing over your identity as a worker to an employer, but-

Joanne Freeman:

Oh, you’re part of a team.

Heather Cox Richardson:

You’re part of a team, and all things that used to be, before the mills, part of your community, are now going to be provided to you, or centered around your employer. And that idea of making sure that there’s not going to be striking, there’s not going to be labor unrest, and there is going to be this sense that we’re all in it for the company, helps to tamp down striking. And of course that all tends to fall apart during the depression when everybody’s out of work, and then with World War II, the New Deal gives a lot of protection to workers, and with that, then we get this whole late 20th century phenomenon, which is entirely different.

Joanne Freeman:

And that’s when you move into the idea of being, as it would’ve been called at the time, a company man, that you find your way into one of these companies that treats you well, and has all kinds of benefits, and attracts you at a young age, and you work your way up in the company, and the company in that sense kind of owns you, but it’s in a very different way from what we have been talking about in the beginning of this episode. It really is, it’s a move from we’re all part of the same team, we’re all part of the same family, to I have signed on for this, I am now part of this endeavor, and my identity is wrapped up with this company and what I do for this company.

Heather Cox Richardson:

In part because of the extraordinary protections for labor in that period, and the regulations on business, those are the people you and I grew up with as our parents generation, and yes, you could have a career as something like a towel salesman for a major corporation, and have a nice house and be able to support a baby boom family, and have real loyalty to that organization, not necessarily only for you, but even sometimes for your children, that they would want to go ahead and join that same company.

Joanne Freeman:

Right, in that sense truly is a big family, one big family.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And then things change.

Joanne Freeman:

And then things change. This is interesting because this is something, as you just suggested, changing in our lifetime, that our parent’s generation are still part of that idea, that they find the company, that they “buy into” that company, they’re part of it, they move up in it, they can have good lives with it, that changes. So you and I are the same age, I know we’ve said that a lot of times on this show, we were at a time when we didn’t necessarily assume that we were going to sign onto a company in that way, but we did assume that we would find a career, and that was capital letters, a career, and that in some way or another we would move up in the career, and that that might involve changing a job once, or twice, or three times, but not regularly, and still, in some way, that there would be some stability in that, and some predictable progression in that, and that that was the way grownups operated out there in the working world.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And it’s really interesting because that is almost the image of the post-World War II America, and yet it was an image that was unattainable to most American workers who were not part of a company like that, and ended up nailing together a bunch of different jobs, if you will, which is, to me, a really interesting thing because they, in many ways, in rural areas, in minority areas, retained ownership of their time and of the ways in which they made their money.

I was actually reading about this, about how in many communities people will work five or six small jobs which gives them great cushions when things go bad because, okay, so those three things don’t work any longer, but I’ve got these, and one of these is doing much better. And so they are jacks of all trades, if you will. And I remember, after 2008 when there was a big crash, and a lot of people lost a lot of money, and a lot of people lost their jobs, and the people that I knew who had this system of working could say, “Well yeah, this is falling apart, but I’ve still got this to rely on.”

Joanne Freeman:

It’s a different kind of personal independence.

Heather Cox Richardson:

It was a different kind of personal independence, and I remember too one of the things, that I suspect you remember as well, is when we were younger, back when we were doing the transition from the company man, and the idea that people would go onto Wall Street and that would be their job, or they’d go to work for a big company and that would be their job, how surprised they were when they got fired. That, wait a minute here, you were supposed to take care of me, that was part of the whole deal. I signed on, I’ve been doing a good job, I’m this many years from retirement, what do you mean you’re tossing me out?

Joanne Freeman:

And particularly, when that happens on a mass scale, particularly when it’s not that you’ve done something wrong and you’re being for fired, it’s that… I was actually once part of a mass firing in which a whole chunk of a company that I worked for was fired on the same day, and they filed us into a room in groups and then told us in groups that we no longer had a job. And it was quite something because I had worked there for a while, and I had come back from lunch and didn’t have a job. Maybe it’s the first time in that kind of a job, in an office job, that I felt that, as we’ve been saying exchangeable, that I was just a level of middle ranked employee, that they were going to keep the important people and they were going to keep the workers, and all the middle people they just decided, we don’t need you anymore, we fired you. It was a strange thing that changed my sense of myself and where I worked, and what my importance was.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And there were a lot of people who made that same realization, that the company loyalty was not being reciprocated after the 1980s.

Joanne Freeman:

Right.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And when we think about where we are in this moment today, it seems to me that that probably has a lot to do with where we are in the wake of this pandemic and this changing concept of work and this great resignation, that so many people who believed initially about the post-World War II idea of the company and loyalty to the company, and the company would pay you back, that I think is largely gone.

Joanne Freeman:

Yeah.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Not entirely, of course, but largely gone.

Joanne Freeman:

But you and I deal with college students, and we are on the front line of watching young people have to readjust their sense of what they’re expecting, what they’re looking towards, what they assume their future’s going to be like, and it’s certainly clear to me, I assume it’s clear to you too, they have some drastically different expectations.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Yes, and they no longer believe that they’re going to have one career.

Joanne Freeman:

Correct.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Now they are much more closely focused on their own skillset, on their own interests, and I don’t disagree with that because the other piece that I think we’re revisiting in a way, like we did in the middle of the 19th century, is that the new technologies mean that many of them will end up working in jobs that haven’t been invented yet.

Joanne Freeman:

Right.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And so what is the point of saying, yes, I’m going to be a software designer for some company that’s going to be defunct in two years, I’m not going to go ahead and give my loyalty to that company, I’m going to learn to design software and to know how to pivot, because otherwise I’m not going to be employable after I’m an old lady at 30.

Joanne Freeman:

That gets a harrumph.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Exactly.

Joanne Freeman:

But that’s interesting because like the people you mentioned a few minutes ago that you know who have maybe five different kinds of gigs and they can balance them, you just used the word pivot referring to these young people, in a sense it’s a similar mentality, you’re not going to place all your bets on one kind of job, not only that you might not know that it exists, but whatever you’re planning to do now might not exist in the future.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, and the other thing about this particular moment is of course that with the lack of labor protections and the lack of regulation, the period really since beginning of the 1980s, the conditions under which many people have worked have gotten to the point that they realized with the pandemic that it just was not worth their time.

Joanne Freeman:

Right.

Heather Cox Richardson:

But what’s really interesting to me about that is the reactions of people who often, at least from what I have been reading, had done this weird pivot from, yes, you’re an essential worker, yes, you’re incredibly important, to saying, you need to get back into that particular fast food restaurant and work, you should be grateful to be working for that price, and you should not want to raise, and you should not want all those things that you’re not willing to work without, and we don’t want to pay extra for you to serve me my french fries.

Joanne Freeman:

In a climate of danger.

Heather Cox Richardson:

In a climate of danger. And that’s what I think we’re getting at here is the changing meaning of work in this particular moment says that work is perhaps, in this post-pandemic moment, no longer about simply getting a paycheck and living your life outside that paycheck, your ever decreasing paycheck, but that rather people are looking at it again and seeing work as a part of who they are.

Joanne Freeman:

What’s fascinating to me about this moment is people are realizing there are options that they didn’t realize were there before. And to a certain degree we all assume, in some way or another, we have a job, and we work eight hours a day, and we work five days a week, and if you’re out in the world and you’re not working at home as a mother or father, that’s what you do. And now we’re in this climate where people are saying, well I don’t know, maybe I could do something different. There are people I work with, not necessarily faculty members, but others who work at Yale who now several days a week are at home working, so I see them less. So the whole climate of something that feels as unchangeable as college education, even that is different, and it’s people making different kinds of choices.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well this is interesting because I’ve never actually worked a nine to five job, so I don’t have any of those expectations of that’s what work looks like. I’ve always worked in places where your time is scheduled, like as a waitress, or where I’m on my own clock, or where I’m nailing different jobs together. So when I hear you say that, to me it’s funny, I kind of see a book that says this is how it’s supposed to be, because certainly we’ve all heard that’s how it’s supposed to be.

Joanne Freeman:

That’s true.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I’ve just almost never seen it to be that way.

Joanne Freeman:

No, that’s very true. Right, in digging around a little bit to try and get a sense of not necessarily how people are responding to the great resignation, but how companies are, I found some interesting things. I won’t name name, but there’s a large financial organization that is beginning a program in which some employees are going to work only 30 hours a week, they’ll have a small pay cut, but they get to keep all of their benefits, so there’s an option that wasn’t necessarily available before. There’s another large company that is basically saying they will eliminate, and this, to me, like why don’t you do this all the time and not necessarily now in a climate of choice? They’ve decided they’re going to eliminate 30% of their meetings so that employees don’t have to sit-

Heather Cox Richardson:

Oh, well talk afterwards so I can go ahead and apply.

Joanne Freeman:

Exactly, I was like, why has no one had that idea before? But still, the fact that these very large organizations, these very large companies, are trying to come up with ways to give people some more control of their time, it’s a fascinating moment.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So the obvious question is where is this going, looking at the past, and I will say that I think this explains one of the reasons that like infrastructure is so important, because one of the big things about the need for flexibility right now is because of the lack of childcare, affordable childcare, and if in fact we had the sorts of changes in our infrastructure system that the Democrats are talking about, it would enable people to go ahead and have more control over their lives, and over their time, and actually over innovation, I think, because one of the reasons that the system has been as strict as it has been is because people needed to go to their jobs for healthcare, and they needed to go to their jobs for the paycheck to have childcare, and they were locked into a system that may not continue to be there.

Joanne Freeman:

And there’s the thing that people like to joke about or ignore, infrastructure, and we’ve locked it right in here, and I think with good reason, into the great resignation, because it’s going to be essential, however people put together their lives again or in new ways as we move on ahead in these change times.

We’ve come full circle here. We started out talking about personal independence, and people in the earliest days of the nation having a sense of personal independence in their work, and having ownership of their time. We’ve now come full circle to a moment when people are at least looking in that direction, thinking about the way that they’re using their time, some people may be having new kinds of options. It’s interesting, I think as historians we never assume that things are always getting better, we never assume that things are always getting worse, we assume that actually contingency, that’s what we always assume is in place. But in a sense, people reevaluating their lives and their connection with work, it’s a longstanding question, but it’s one that perhaps people haven’t thought about in quite this way for quite a long time.