Mentioning “total work” earlier today has me thinking again about how strange our contemporary work culture seems to me. Strange, I think, because I never really came through the usual acculturating institutions.
A bit about my background. I come from a working class lineage, through my grandparents and beyond. Well, that’s being generous about my dad’s family, which might be better described as “working-when-not-drunk class.” There are some professionals here and there among the aunts and uncles and cousins but my direct line is all laborers, secretaries, and cooks (not chefs!). My mom worked in entry-level medical and clerical jobs. My dad worked at the French Lick hotel in the bad old days, before it was restored by the Cook family. He also worked on the railroad before a disastrous accident that ruined his back. Eventually he got a HVAC certificate at Ivy Tech and worked a few years at a local HVAC company (whose owners moonlighted as a Southern Gospel quartet) before getting on at the Ford factory in its declining years. He worked there until his death; it moved to Mexico not long after. I resonate with Wendell Berry’s disdain for James B. Duke because I feel the same way about Bill Clinton: unforgetting, unyielding contempt because of what he and his rich friends did to my family and community.
I was encouraged to get an education, in the practical “get a good job” sense. They were excited for me when I started on the pharmacy track at Butler University. Alas, organic chemistry and romance ended those hopes: I quit after my sophomore year because Rachel was the only future that mattered. I started looking for delivery jobs simply because I liked the delivery job in high school. That led me to interview for a shipping and receiving job (delivery adjacent!) in a small manufacturer. While I was interviewing, the guy said “You know, we just had an office job open up today and I think you’re better suited for that.” Swallowing my offended feelings, I accepted an accounts receivable job.
At some point I had put my name in the lottery for a job at the Ford factory. While I was working in AR at the manufacturer, I got a call from Ford. (Rachel, was that call actually offering me the job or only offering me an interview? My memory is fuzzy, as usual.) At that point in the factory’s history, they weren’t really offering the full-time, union-benefits jobs. You could work your way into those but a job at Ford/Visteon was no longer a guarantee of a solid, middle-class living. My dad didn’t love the idea of me working in a factory, especially since it no longer offered a secure future. My pastor also thought I should “do something more” and encouraged me to finish my degree. I turned down Ford/Visteon and started night classes in accounting. Why accounting? Because I was working in accounts receivable. Imaginative, right?
Eventually my employer closed the manufacturing business and I got a job at a big nonprofit doing data entry in the accounting department. I eventually finished my BS in Accounting, slowly worked my way up in the accounting department, took several more classes, became a CPA, became the assistant controller and then interim VP of accounting for a few months before I quit and took my current, intentionally downsized job. Embrace downward mobility, as I told a friend recently.
One of the main reasons I embraced downward mobility was contemporary work culture. As I mentioned before, and as you can see from my history, I’ve never been a product of the right acculturating institutions. I didn’t graduate from the sort of “b-school” that had alumni networking events; it was the sort of school that advertised on daytime TV for people who were “unemployed or underemployed, or looking to turn their career around.”
I don’t read business books and I don’t listen to podcasts instructing me on how to be a “people leader.” I don’t admire CEOs or entrepreneurs (quite the opposite). I steadfastly refuse business lingo. The goals and lifestyles of those who are successful in this work culture are utterly strange to me, like I’m visiting another planet. For this I am thankful.
Despite my occasional dream of a liberal arts education, my actual educational experience has been eminently practical. Years ago I said I was a white-collar worker with a blue-collar heart–and I think that’s more true than ever. That’s not to say I didn’t pick up some affectations along the way. For a long time the “do something more” idea remained a part of me and I thought of myself as an aspiring intellectual. Thank God that’s over. I’m still scraping off some barnacles here and there but I’ve made peace with who I am and, more importantly, where I come from. In true second-half-of-life fashion, this work of reclamation is the task that matters now.