Numlock Sunday: Adam Chandler on America's work-life balance
By Walt Hickey
Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.
This week, I spoke to Adam Chandler, author of the book 99% Perspiration: A New Working History of the American Way of Life, which is out as of this week.
I really enjoyed this book! Adam wrote a previous favorite of mine, Drive Thru Dreams, and this book spring-boarded off of that in a fascinating way. It covers the American relationship with work, and is both a neat work of history as well as a prescient socioeconomic look at how attitudes toward work and the principles underscoring them are evolving.
We spoke about American ideals of hard work and individualism, their origins, and how our work culture compares to that of other Western countries.
Chandler can be found at adamchandler.com, and the book can bought through bookshop.org, and wherever books are sold.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Adam , you are the author of the brand-new book 99% Perspiration: A New Working History of the American Way of Life. It is out this week. I read it and really, really enjoyed it. What got you interested in work? Your previous book, a lot of folks here might be familiar with, was about fast food. It seemed like a very interesting, logical next step for you to write about this.
I joke that what could I do after spending a few years in the land of Big Macs and Cheesy Gordita Crunches and find more to spare? And the answer was the American work culture.
But in all seriousness, my experience while reporting the last book really made a book about work feel like the next logical step. While I was writing and reporting on fast-food culture in America, I would meet these franchise owners and corporate executives from McDonald's or Wendy's or Burger King who all had these stories of starting on the fryers in the 1970s when they were 15 years old for $1.25 an hour, and working their way up through the ranks to becoming executives, multiple franchise owners, and millionaires. It was an article of faith within their industry that hard work is what got them there, and hard work alone. There was a lot of resistance to the minimum wage and providing certain benefits to their employees.
I found that fascinating, because the modern fast-food worker has no shot at that trajectory. Generally speaking, it's not something that's possible. I thought that divide over the myth of hard work versus the reality of what ambition and success look like now was completely different. The modern fast-food worker is not a teenager working for pocket money. It's generally somebody who's 25 or 26, the median age, and maybe has debt and some dependence, and the cost of living is so much higher. I found that to be a really great way into writing about work.
The evolution of work culture in the book is very interesting, because you talk about the immigrant narrative, you talk about the frontier, you talk about the era of industrialization and automation. You cover just so many different and dynamic elements of history. I gotta tell you, I was really looking forward to this book for a very long time. I had no idea how far back you were going to take this. You take it to the Mayflower hitting America. It makes sense, but why did you feel the desire to go that far back? How intrinsic is the work culture of America to the first people who showed up here?
It's a great question. I really did myself a disservice by doing this, by going so far back, because obviously it takes a lot of work and energy to dive into those kinds of historical archives and research.
But I thought to get at what's so fascinating about the story of America and the narrative that we project in American life about hard work and individual grit, you have to talk about those things. You have to talk about why we adopted Columbus as the symbol of the New World, when it was a completely arbitrary decision to embrace this explorer as the avatar of American self-realization. That through line about hard work and discovery and innovation carries all the way through. There are little pieces of it that resonate, that create this mosaic of the American idea of hard work and aspiration, that has to do with individuals.
We talk about the Protestant work ethic as being something that is individually focused and driven. It's not really about community. It's not really about interdependence with your neighbors or other people around you. It's, you will work hard and you will succeed. But there's so much more to the story than that.
It just pops up all around and all throughout the history. Even the frontier — getting into that in the book was fascinating to me because we have this mythology of ruffian cowboys riding up cattle trails, or frontiers people, pioneers settling the West, but there was a lot of business involved in that. There were federal troops and government funds and all kinds of subsidies that made this action possible. But we really look at it as rugged individuals who settled the West and created all of these life-changing innovations in American life.
Thomas Edison is another example of that, and why I picked one of his quotes for the title. So I went way back for those reasons, because it really is this inescapable part of American life that just has us in its thrall.
It was really cool to go that far back. You wrote about Benjamin Franklin, who I will now never not think of as just the first poster of LinkedIn in American history. But there was a moment in the book where I actually had to pause the audiobook. I was listening to it and it would be like, wait, what? The first president of the Massachusetts Bay Colony worked himself to death in a field?
Exactly. There are all these weird absurdities of how our adoption of the idea of hard work, going back to John Carver, just absolutely manifests itself in self-sacrifice to the point of exhaustion, and emotional exhaustion. Overwork and the failure of work to actually create sustainable lives is the crisis of our era right now, but there are all these different points in history where you can look at it and say, wow, we were actually experiencing similar things in the past as well. We didn't really change our way of thinking about it all that much. There are ebbs and flows, but generally speaking, we've always been a very individualistic country with a lot of focus on success being personal. And there are some drawbacks to that. That's a big part of why I wanted to write the book; this thinking has trapped us in a difficult place.
How so?
Well, if you're told, as we often are, that all you need to do is work hard, apply yourself, and you will make something of yourself — and this is a big, a big theme in American life — it turns success and failure into matters of character, of personal worth. In the book I call this the American abracadabra, which is the idea that if you fail to make it in the land of opportunity, it's because you didn't try hard enough. That means that if you fail, you deserve it.
For people who can't make it, which is a record of people growing by the day, that creates a lot of shame and a lot of anger. I think a lot of the fury and discord that we see in the country right now can be attributed to the fact that it's shameful to need help. It's shameful to fail. Those are things that are secretly embedded in the system. The bootstraps narrative, the bootstraps myth, has a dark side to it, and that's the reality that people are living right now.
Can you speak more about how embedded that is? There's always the idea that fish don't know they're in water, right? You also explored and went to other places on this lovely earth that don't necessarily have this kind of point of view. What don't Americans get?
So I went to France, in large part because I fell weirdly in love with the show Emily in Paris during the pandemic. I was writing a book about work and I needed something to distract myself, and then there's this story of a go-getter marketer from Chicago who plunges herself into the French work culture, which has none of that careerist mentality. And these are just broad stereotypes, but they happen to be kind of true.
Going to France and spending time in the work culture, reporting, you see things that just make you scratch your head. The fact that there is, by law, a lunch break for French people every day. They're supposed to take at least an hour for lunch, sometimes two, going back to the Industrial Revolution. This is something that's embedded in the labor code. It's not perfect, and there are plenty of loopholes, but that creates an expectation that you're going to have breaks in the day where you can take time for yourself and run errands, socialize with friends, have non-work-related conversations with coworkers. It's not just eating a sad salad at your desk, and that creates a different expectation of what work is and is not in your life. I think that's meaningful.
Another thing that jumped out to me was just going to museums and the cultural institutions in France. When you go to buy a ticket, there's a special designation for people who are either unemployed or searching for work, with a lower admission fee for the Louvre or Musée d'Orsay or something like that. It's basically saying if you're not working, if you don't have a job right now, you should still be able to go out and enjoy your life, see fine art, live your life.
I can't imagine that existing in the U.S. I am sure some museums do it and some places do it, but the fact that it's widespread is jarring, because it really speaks to a difference of philosophy about what life and work should be.
That is absolutely interesting. That would never happen here in so many ways.
Definitely not.
What else do you think are some of the ramifications of this? You have a really interesting statistic in the book that really caught my eye, which is that in the U.S., according to the census, the top 10 percent of income earners work 4.4 hours more than the bottom 10 percent of income earners. These are all people who have a job, or at least earn money. But you immediately point out after that, and it hadn't even occurred to me, that that dynamic is completely not the case in other countries. The opposite, in fact, tends to be true.
Right. Part of that equation is that in American life, broadly speaking, work is the source of identity, and your professional identification is meaningful in ways that it doesn't seem to be in other places. We tend to ask each other, upon meeting, “What do you do?” Which is a natural thing, but is not as commonplace in other parts of the world as you might think.
But some of this also has to do with income inequality. The fact that so many people aren't getting by makes it so that we want to show that we are working hard, because that gives us a sense of value and that the success we do have is earned. What I think is interesting about this — and there's much more to this conversation, but what stands out to me is, when you work late hours in the U.S., it's seen as a sign of loyalty or devotion to the company, and to your career, and to your professional identity as a hardworking, industrious person. That's something we've always cherished. And hard work isn't necessarily a bad thing, but when you look at a place like France, or Denmark, or other countries that we like to compare ourselves to, if you're working at the office at 7 o'clock or 11 o'clock at night, it's seen as wrong. It's seen as inefficient, or like something is wrong with this equation. Either the company is understaffed, or you're doing your job poorly, but something institutionally is off-kilter.
That's really amazing to think about. I remember being told, for the first few weeks of the job, always stay late, show that you're there. It makes this performative aspect of work such a feature of life, and in ways that deprive us of social lives, of being there for community, being there for family, and that's broadly not good. It's a dangerous thing to invest so much emotion and identity in your work at the expense of other facets of your life. That's part of why we're burnt out, and part of why we're lonely, and part of why it's just difficult for us to connect.
Interesting. It seems like you never really understand that what other societies necessarily think of as jaw-dropping and heinous is just a fairly standard element of the American experience. The book makes a very deliberate choice to spend a lot of time and space on that. Coming to it from your previous book, which is about fast food, a very unique labor environment, where do you assess this problem is coming from, and what are some of the institutions and ideas that you write about in the book that are endeavoring to fix it?
It's a good question. Some of my focus, in particular, was on what happened in the early days of the pandemic. We passed all of these protections and safeguards that were meant to make people feel protected during the very nerve-wracking and unstable moments of the pandemic. Because so many people were out of work, we put in these eviction moratoriums and rental assistance safeguards. We made sure that people who were on Medicaid didn't have to constantly renew their work verifications to stay covered. We passed the child tax credit expansion, which basically gave low-income people money, $250 to $300 per child per month, and said for the first time that what you do by raising children, or looking after people in your household, is work.
All of those protections were there for a moment and then they went away, despite the fact that we had historic drops in child poverty, and people were paying down debt, and people were saying no to bad jobs that weren't safe or weren't paying well enough. People had the capacity to do that because there was more money coming in from expanded benefits. Unemployment insurance, for example. People were able to breathe for the first time, and then all those protections went away.
But there are all these other people who stepped into the breach. There are mayors in favor of a basic income, a guaranteed income, who have been doing pilot programs to help people in communities and create this database of information around giving people money for various things. Whether it's the price of housing in Los Angeles, or young mothers in poverty, they're looking at these different problems and what giving people a little bit of income will do to fix them, and how that has ripple effects.
That's just one example of things that we've seen. The pandemic was really instructive, because we had support that felt extraordinary to us, even though it was pretty basic compared to what other countries in our general market basket do to protect their citizens. That speaks to a lot of the anger that's emerged since the pandemic. Since the pandemic waned and those protections went away, we've dealt with the blowback of it. We now have record homelessness, record household debt, and child poverty is shooting way back up. We're really dealing with the fallout from that. But we now have this data that shows, hey, this stuff actually works, and advocates are trying to bring it back to focus as we charge ahead.
Is there energy behind that? Clearly there's the data, but where are people trying out potentially permanent extensions of some of those social safety net elements?
It's interesting to see how states have been involved in creating small basic income programs. Or, the minimum wage went up in a number of states. It didn't go up by a lot, but the state minimum wages went up in a number of places, and not all of them were liberal blue states. Some of them were places like South Dakota, and that's an interesting note to say that people are understanding that there is a problem here.
In the book, I talk about an economic opportunity poll in 2002 where 23% of workers said they were working hard but they weren't getting ahead. Twenty years later, in 2023, 39% were saying they're failing to get ahead despite working hard. So a huge number, nearly 40% of the country, has said despite all my hard work, I'm not getting ahead.
Politicians are finally at least kind of acknowledging that this is a problem, and perhaps paying closer attention to it in ways that are more bipartisan than you would expect. It has to be couched in certain ways to make it politically palatable, but there are important initiatives that are happening as this big realignment is going on in American politics.
That's interesting to see. Historically, this has broken down on union versus nonunion lines, but the lines are really shifting pretty quickly, and automation in no small part seems to be an element of that.
Absolutely. There are a lot of quilted vest tech bros who are like, yeah, we need a basic income. That is unexpected. You'd perhaps expect their political affiliation to say otherwise.
There are really interesting points of view from all corners of the political spectrum that are saying the same things, just using slightly different language. That's what was interesting to me. For the book I traveled everywhere. I went all around the country: I talked to a pastor in rural Alabama, a construction worker in Milwaukee. I'm originally from Texas, and I now live in New York.
All the conversations I was having with people about ambition and aspiration had a lot of overlap and a lot of similarity to them. I think it's true that we ultimately want more of the same things than we're led to believe, and there's real power in that. I'm hoping that we're able to connect the dots more.
Outstanding. The book is 99% Perspiration. I'll throw it to you: Where can folks find the book? What's the quick elevator pitch for the book, and then where can folks find you?
The book is about the culture of work in American life. It's a history, but it's also a modern take on it. What I'd really say the book is about is why are we so angry right now? That's actually what the book has become in my mind.
I would say, if you can ask your library to provide it, community is a big part of the book. Institutions and a love of institutions in this terrible time is a big part of the book, so request it from your library or seek out bookshop.org, which is a way you can order it from your local bookstore.
I'm at adamchandler.com. I post all my new work and all the events that I'm doing for the book out there. I would love to talk if anyone wants to drop me an email, say hello, tell me about their work life.
Awesome. Thanks so much, Adam.
Thanks so much. I really appreciate it.
Edited by Susie Stark.
If you have anything you’d like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock.
Thank you so much for becoming a paid subscriber!
Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news.