The Good Society and the Dignity of Workers
In April 2020, as COVID spread across America, John Deranamie, a meat-packer at the Smithfield Foods pork processing plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, was considered an “essential” worker by his employer. “I don’t like the term essential worker,” he said. “Essential worker just means you’re on the death track.” But with the average meat-packer’s salary at around $30,000 and a family to support, he couldn’t risk losing his job. So he went to work - and he, along with hundreds of co-workers, got sick. He was one of millions that kept our lives – and the economy afloat. He is also one of the tens of millions who earn neither the pay nor often the respect that their contributions deserve.
Meatpackers, child care workers, nursing assistants, grocery store clerks and home health care aides, as more examples, never fall anywhere near the top in surveys of the most respected professions. Those surveys recognize doctors, lawyers, engineers, members of the military, teachers, accountants and scientists. Those workers certainly deserve respect and the pay they get. Yet workers like John Deranamie seem to get respect only briefly, when we realize how much we need them, and they never get paid commensurate with that respect.
All of us need to feel respected for the work we do. All legitimate work is important for society, including unpaid work. All workers have dignity by virtue of being human, but dignity can be hard for them to feel, especially when the larger society doesn’t express it. As Martin Luther King, Jr. put it while in Memphis in 1968 to support the strike of local sanitation workers:
“One day our society will come to respect the sanitation workers if it is to survive, for the person who picks up our garbage is in the final analysis as significant as the physician, for if he doesn’t do his job, diseases are rampant. All labor has dignity.”
We have a tendency to respect most those jobs requiring college degrees and extensive training. This is at the heart of Harvard professor Michael Sandel’s critique of Americans’ bedrock belief in meritocracy: that college-educated workers deserve the respect and pay they get because of their talents and hard work. In The Tyranny of Merit, he questions our faith in meritocracy. Talent, he notes, is pretty evenly shared among people, with only rare exceptions such as an Einstein. What enables some people to use talent more fully is a matter of where they fall in society and the resources available from family and connections. Further, there is no justification to argue, for example, that doctors work harder than coal miners:
“Learning to become a plumber or electrician or dental hygienist should be respected as a valuable contribution to the common good, not regarded as a consolation prize for those who lack the SAT scores or financial means to make it to the Ivy League.”
The result of our unquestioning adherence to meritocracy, he says, is the belief by those who rise to the top that they deserve what they get and that those who don’t could have risen if only they were smarter or worked harder. This bodes ill for all of us:
“even if a meritocracy were fair, it would not be a good society. It would generate hubris and anxiety among the winners and humiliation and resentment among the losers - - attitudes at odds with human flourishing and corrosive of the common good.”
Sandel also critiques the traditional approach to addressing the wide income gap arising from meritocratic thinking. Distributive justice – such as the Earned Income Tax credit, food stamps, welfare – aims to assuage the disparity in wages but it cannot generate more respect for the working class. As Sandel says in regard to voters, such as those who flocked to Donald Trump in 2016 because of their resentments:
“They [contemporary liberals] have been offering working-class and middle-class voters a greater measure of distributive justice – fairer, fuller access to the fruits of economic growth. But what these voters want even more is a greater measure of contributive justice – an opportunity to win the social recognition and esteem that go with producing what others need and value.”
This is no small challenge. A good society needs to enable all its citizens to feel a sense of dignity and to be recognized – in societal esteem and a sufficient wage – for the work they do. Unfortunately, the Republican Party seems intent on channeling the anger of citizens without sufficient pay and recognition into cultural issues while the Democratic Party fails to appreciate why those with less education and lower income are so angry, wondering why efforts at distributive justice don’t garner more acclaim.
Encouraging people to make the most of their talents through hard work – the meritocratic principle – is not wrong. But until we enable workers in whatever work they choose to get the financial and social rewards for doing just that, the “good society” – one where we appreciate each other and work together to solve our problems - will be an unmet goal.
Photo Credit: Emma Houghton @ unsplash.com
