Does Work Ethic Determine Income?

Bo Brusco | August 10, 2020

"Essential Worker" by pasa47 is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Hard Work: The American Value

Hard work is an iconic American value. Whether we are talking about the Revolutionary War or landing a man on the moon, American grit is always center stage. Even the concept of “The American Dream,” with its emphasis on elbow grease over class, is a testament to how integral hard work is to our identity. But for how much stock we traditionally put in this characteristic, we ought to ask ourselves if the U.S.A. still values hard work in 2020?

Is Poverty a Personality Defect?

There are some of us who value hard work to a fault. Nodding our heads in agreement with Margaret Thatcher’s philosophy that “poverty is a personality defect,” we reason that one’s socioeconomic standing is a direct result of how hard they work. This mentality perceives poverty as a just reward for the underperforming and undeserving—if someone is resorting to food stamps and unemployment checks, they must be looking for a “free handout.” Although some individuals do seek to take advantage of welfare programs, most government aid recipients are working people.

Looking at the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) data as an example, in 2019, only 12% of the U.S. population received SNAP benefits. Of those 38 million people, more than 67% were raising children, almost 34% were in families with members who were elderly or had disabilities, and more than 43% were employed, meaning that of the 330 million people living in America in 2019, only 6.2% of them were unemployed SNAP recipients.

Of course, there are several other government programs, but it is important to note that only a small portion of our entire population are unemployed while receiving these particular “free handouts.” Also, of that 6.2%, many could be physically incapacitated, mentally disadvantaged, or otherwise unable to work. It is also likely that many of them are part of the 1.5 million formerly incarcerated individuals who struggle to find employment. And as indicated by the statistics above, many of these unemployed SNAP recipients are also attempting to care for more than just themselves. 

Are “Free Handouts” Free?

I keep putting “free handouts” in quotations because most Americans receiving public benefits have paid for them, so perhaps they are neither handouts nor free. Elaborating on government programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Unemployment Insurance, Joy Moses from americanprogress.org said, “Within these social insurance programs, most of the participants have paid into them, through payroll taxes taken out of their own paychecks and through contributions paid on their behalf by their employers.” These programs function like most insurances wherein regular contributions are made with the expectation of financial security in any crisis.

Social Security is an excellent example of a government program that is by no means a “free handout” because of all the federal money going to individuals, senior citizens collect the most. According to figures published by the Office of Management and Budget of the U.S. Government, senior citizens account for 55% of all government aid recipients, with low-income Americans coming in second place, accounting for only 29%. Of course, these numbers may look different today as a result of COVID-19. However, it is still important to understand that receiving financial aid from the government is not a definitive indicator of a person’s work ethic. Furthermore, the flaws in these welfare programs make it even more complicated for the working poor to earn a reasonable wage.

Systemic Flaws 

Amy Jo Hutchison, a hard-working single mother of two from West Virginia, brought the flaws of our welfare programs before the U.S. House Committee earlier this year. She began her remarks by saying, “Today, I'm here to help you better understand poverty, because poverty is my lived experience, and to acknowledge the biased beliefs that poor people are lazy and that poverty is their fault.” To articulate how flawed the welfare system is, she cited one of her friend’s experiences. “She was promoted to manager and within 30 days had to report her new income to DHHR.,” Ms. Hutchison explained, “Within 60 days, her rent jumped from $475-$950 a month. She lost her SNAP benefits, and her family's health insurance was gone. So she did what poor people are forced to do all the time: she resigned her promotion and went back to working part-time just so she and her family could survive.” It seems that these programs that are designed to help lift people out of poverty inadvertently accomplish the opposite.

What is interesting about this experience is that this individual was not lazy. She was promoted to a management position, yet she was stripped of her family’s health insurance and rent assistance. So she was not rewarded for that all-American value of hard work but punished in spite of it. Ms. Hutchinson, who also struggles to make ends meet, is a hard working American too. She has a Bachelor’s degree and works two jobs, yet she feels compelled to come before the House Committee to help them understand how “The current poverty guidelines are ridiculously out of touch.” 

The video of Ms. Hutchison’s statements has since gained the attention of millions, but if you haven’t seen it yet, or read her transcript, I can’t recommend it enough. She concisely articulates how difficult it is for hard-working people to escape poverty.)

A Growing Problem

As these systemic flaws prevent people from escaping poverty, more and more Americans are living in it. Over the last 30 years, the ranks of the working poor have increased from 7 million in the 1980’s to over 12 million today, even though Americans are working harder now than ever. Fox Business stated in 2019 that “As the unemployment rate remained near multi-decade lows, a record-high number of Americans are working multiple jobs.” Echoing this reality during the primary debates this year, Rep. Tim Ryan said that “the economic system…now force(s) us to have two or three jobs just to get by.” It is apparent that majority of Americans are not lazy nor unwilling to work, so the argument that we are all just looking for a free handout doesn’t hold water.

The Psychology of Poverty

In his Ted Talk titled Poverty isn’t a lack of character; it’s a lack of cash, Rutger Bregman explains poverty’s psychological toll. Referring to a study conducted by American psychologists on sugar cane farmers in India, Bregman explains how poverty causes a 14 point decrease in a person’s IQ. Bregman also noted how the study suggested that long-term decision making went out the window for those affected by poverty in an effort to focus on the multitude of more pressing matters. 

One of the psychologists who facilitated this study, Eldar Shafir, summed up their findings in two words: Scarcity Mentality, meaning people behave and think differently when something—whether time, food, or money—is scarce. Bregman explains this psychological state by comparing scarcity mentality with a computer that’s running 10 heavy programs at once. “It gets slower and slower, making errors. Eventually, it freezes—not because it’s a bad computer, but because it has too much to do at once. The poor have the same problem,” he explains, “they’re not making dumb decisions because they are dumb, but because they’re living in a context in which anyone would make dumb decisions.”

Even with government aid, many of our fellow Americans living in poverty are still forced to operate on this scarcity mentality. With so many scarcities and immediate needs that must be met, they don’t have the luxury of being able to mentally operate at their highest potential level. This brings us back to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. The primary prerequisite that must be met before we can reach our potential are our physiological needs (i.e. food, water, warmth, and rest). If these things are scarce, our brains will instinctively prioritize meeting those needs because they are the most important. So not only is poverty hard work, as Ms. Hutchison explained, it is also mentally taxing as Bregman suggests because their brains are working harder to meet their most fundamental human needs.

Do We Truly Value Hard Work in America?

Research is continuously sounding the alarm of the psychological impact of poverty, and the flaws in our antiquated welfare systems are becoming more glaring as we trudge through the 21st century. Perhaps, then, the problem does not lie in our quality of labor, and maybe what people in poverty really need is for their most immediate needs to be met until they can afford—financially and mentally—to do so on their own. Despite what we’ve already discussed about welfare programs and scarcity mentality, we still like to say that we value hard work in America; however, the wage disparities in our nation would suggest otherwise. If we genuinely valued hard work in America, it would logically follow that it would be rewarded, but that is not the case.

Conflicting Traditions

There are two trains of thought when it comes to an individual’s monetary worth. The first, as we’ve already explored, is how hard you work. The second is how valuable your labor’s contribution is to society. This train of thought is evident in a big push-back we are seeing against Liberal Arts Degrees and the promotion of trade jobs like plumbing or carpentry. There used to be a time when our elders would tell us that if we wanted to get a real job we needed to get a college education. However, now that many of us have obtained an education and are still unemployed, we are being told it is because we didn’t get the right education—that we didn’t major in the right field. Because your major isn’t as important as someone else’s, you no longer qualify for that “real job” you were promised (not to say this isn’t a valid argument).

Breaking this down, let’s start with the pushback against college degrees. The people who raised the younger generations on the “you need to go to college” mantra are the same ones who are now saying you should have gone to trade school. Jeremy Boreing, from PragerU, says that “one of the dumbest things you can do is go to the place that’s supposed to make you smart—that would be college.” There is also a video from PragerU’s website that advises against following your passion and encourages following opportunity instead. In this video, the narrator suggests that going to a trade school will be a more lucrative option than attending a University in hopes of becoming a professional performing artist. Not to say there isn’t merit in this advice, but it is interesting how it differs from tradition, especially considering PragerU typically affiliates itself with traditional, all-American values. 

In 2012, Pew Research conducted a study in which they asked parents how many of them expected their kids to go to college? The answer was not at all surprising. A whopping 94% of American parents said that they indeed expected their kids to go to college, and that was the expectation that many of us were raised on. But now, we are told that too many of us have useless degrees. Whether or not that is true is beside the point. The fact is that many Americans followed this traditional route, in which they were indoctrinated, and are now out in a world that is more concerned with leeching off their student loan debt than helping them find employment. And thanks to this formula so many have optimistically followed, as of 2019, one in every 20 college graduates is unemployed. 

You Reap What You Sow

So now, even a college degree, the previously proposed fail-safe measure for avoiding poverty, has become ineffective. Though the argument that this outcome is fair and just might be tempting to make (because how valuable can one’s contribution to society truly be if their degree is in the Arts?), it is contingent upon the principle of the sower. This is in reference to the biblical principle of what you sow is what you reap. So if you sow a “useless” degree or position of employment that doesn’t benefit your community, then you ought to reap a useless wage. However, this is not the case in America and it might be ignorant to assume that it is.

Evaluating some wage statistics, public school teachers in the majority of the states must have a Bachelor’s degree, must pass (and pay for) the state’s praxis exam, and must qualify for (and purchase) the state’s teaching license. Teaching is a laborious career, and there is a wide consensus that teachers are some of the most important contributors to society, considering they help raise America’s future generations; but the average starting yearly salary for a public school teacher is $44,647. Though it’s not a terrible wage, when you are sowing the literal future of America, $40k is a disproportionately small reaping. 

Without elaborating on the difficulty of a teacher’s labor nor how meaningful their contribution is to society, let’s compare this to a less consequential career. Professional athletes make anywhere from 300,000 to 6.2 million dollars per season, a significantly larger reaping than that of a teacher’s. I should reiterate, however, that my argument here is that our income is not correlated with how challenging our position is nor how much we contribute to society; I am not suggesting that professional athletes should or should not earn as much as they do, but this example clearly illustrates how irrelevant our contributions to society are in regards to how much we earn because unlike teachers, athletes are not raising this country’s next generation of thinkers. 

With no correlation between income and difficulty of labor or societal contribution, the college vs trade school argument feels fragile and we are left to wonder what characteristic is rewarded in America? Because it certainly is not hard work.

Essential Work Reaps Minimum Wage

Perhaps the best example we have ever seen of this truth came to us thanks to COVID-19. When states across the country went into lockdown, our dependence on essential workers became painfully apparent. While some of us had to sit at home, many Americans continued to work to keep our country afloat. But even in this unique instance, there were still wage disparities even for those American’s whose jobs were deemed “essential.” If we truly paid people according to how important their work is, these essential workers should have been making so much more than just minimum wage—even before the pandemic. But they weren’t and they still aren’t because we do not financially reward those Americans who contribute the most to society. How can an individual sow a service so essential that we could not have functioned without it, yet reap minimum wage?

Consider This

America’s emphasis on hard work is a facade in 2020. If we hope to substantiate the claim that we do in fact value grit and elbow grease, then we need to pay Americans according to how hard they work and how beneficial their contributions are to society. But the mere existence of the working poor is compelling evidence that our commerce does not reward hard work.  

The people who live in poverty are like you. They are human beings who seek to meet their fundamental needs and live the American dream. They may be underpaid, underfed, overworked, and overwhelmed, but they are not lazy, and though they may earn less than you, they still contribute to society. Before we paint them with the broad strokes of a stereotype, we ought to consider what Bregman said in his Ted Talk: People in poverty don’t lack character; they lack cash.