REVIEW & OUTLOOK
America Works
Honk if you love your job.
Probably it comes as no news to the American people that we still rank among the most industrious workers in the world, that our vacation days are far fewer than the famously generous holidays dispensed in, say, France, Italy and Germany--and that a fair number of us don't even take all the holidays we are entitled to.
To put it another way, even amid our post-Enron world every serious survey taken shows not only that most Americans remain satisfied with their jobs but that large majorities feel loyal to their companies. Much of this story is revealed in the American Enterprise Institute's fascinating, just-released collection of surveys from major pollsters including Gallup, Harris, RoperASW, and the National Opinion Research Center.
One survey, for example, reports 33% of worker respondents attesting that they "like" their jobs, 28% more who say they "love" their work and 26% of the remainder describing themselves as "enthusiastic." That doesn't leave many in the take-this-job-and-blank-it category. All of which simply underscores another common finding: Namely how remarkably few Americans hate or dislike their jobs.
A key to these findings, perhaps, is what Americans seem to value most about working. Pop psychologists have these many decades been telling us how unhealthy it is to derive our sense of self from our jobs--wisdom that has apparently fallen on deaf ears. A majority of us surveyed in 2001 say that our jobs give us our sense of identity, against a minority who describe their jobs as something they just happen to do for a living. The AEI results go on to report that at the very top of the list of what we say we want from our jobs is what we also say they give us: "a feeling of accomplishment."
Perhaps more compelling in wake of the scandals that have roiled corporate America these past two years is what these polls tell us about worker attitudes toward business and ethics. The polls here do indicate that as a people we want more regulation of business and the perpetrators of corporate malfeasance brought to justice. Less well-reported is that we at the same time show a parallel wariness of things that smack of more federal agencies. To read these survey responses is to appreciate the depth of that wariness. However much concern may have risen about big business, the American people pretty clearly remain more concerned about the dangers posed by big government.
Perhaps most disappointing to those waiting to liberate us from our capitalist chains is that most of us also feel our own loyalty to our own companies is reciprocated, and that our employers care for us. In spite of the endless caricatures of heartless bosses that tumble out of Hollywood onto the silver screen--from Gordon Gekko to Larry the Liquidator -- the American worker evidently has no trouble distinguishing the world he encounters every day and the employer he knows from the politically driven fantasies he sees on TV or at the movie theater.
Doubtless this capacity has everything to do with the answers pollsters were given when they asked, in 1999, Americans to tell them just why America is so successful. The free enterprise system, the answer given by 81%, ranked very close to the top, just behind the Constitution and our free elections--and well ahead of freedom of the press, God's will, the two-party system or the separation of church and state. Roughly the same rankings were accorded in polls taken in 1974.
And we have the same cheerful message for the doom-and-gloomers who like to bemoan how the work ethic of yesteryear is dead or dying. In 1973, 68% of us said we would continue to work if we were able to live as comfortably as we would like for the rest of our lives. In 2002, an identical 68% gave that response. It strikes us that the satisfaction of the American worker is related directly both to the values that form the American character and to the openness of the American system.
As we say, most of this really shouldn't come as news. On the eve of our Labor Day celebrations, though, what gives us even more optimism is that the results reported today are consistent with the results pollsters have found over the decades.
The good news is that the American economy has long since blurred the once-sharp line between labor and capital. The even happier news is that no one appreciates that more than the American worker.
