Why do we work? For the money, or at least, that’s the easy answer. Gotta put food on the table. Still, isn’t there more to it than just punching a clock and getting a paycheck? Shouldn’t our work mean something? Isn’t that why, when we first meet someone we ask, “What do you do for a living?” which is really just a roundabout way of asking, “Why do you matter?”
In his memoir, American Grunt: Ridiculous Stories of a Life Lived at $8.00 an Hour, Kevin Cramer recounts the various ways he’s earned a paycheck over the course of his working life. He writes that after fifty, he lost count of how many jobs he’s had, and behind each anecdote, there’s an implicit question, What does this job mean?
He begins with his first job delivering newspapers at the age of eleven. He doesn’t yet need to earn a paycheck. He takes the job because he thinks it’s cool to ride his bike around and get paid for it. We imagine his parents thinking it’s a good opportunity to learn valuable life lessons. There, once again, we see some greater purpose lurking behind a job: work builds character.
But Cramer didn’t write this book to make heavy statements about capitalism or justice in the American workplace; his first goal is to entertain. He takes full delight in telling you about his time as a Muffin Man, delivering Entenmann’s products to local grocery stores.
“Can we have muffin battles in inappropriate places at inappropriate times?” He asks the friend who proposes the gig to him.
To which his friend replies: “Fuck yeah, we can have muffin battles in inappropriate places at inappropriate times. Why do you think I asked you to come along?”
And with that same attitude he tells us about the inappropriate guys at the warehouse, the grocery store manager who uses every bit of power available in his retail fiefdom to make the job miserable for two kids scrambling to figure it out.
Yet with the humor, Cramer delivers astute observations about the politics of each place where he works. At a factory job, he gets the typical, “We don’t pay you to stand around and gab! You got time to lean, you got time to clean!”
As Cramer does with all the stupidity he endures, he gives sarcastic commentary:
Five minutes later the warehouse would be overrun with people slowly and aimlessly walking around behind push brooms. Wall Street was caught completely off guard when LDL immediately shot into the Fortune 500.
It’s the perfect anecdote for the make-work practice endemic to so many workplaces. In his wonderful piece of anthropology, Bullshit Jobs, David Graeber traces the origins of make-work to the development of wage labor. It’s odd, when you think about it, selling our time for money. There’s a logic in seeing a good that you need or want, like a nice chair or a cupcake. You pay the chair maker or the baker for the item you value. It’s something else to pay a person to make chairs or cupcakes for a specific amount of time. A distrust arises. Maybe they’re not making chairs or cupcakes to the best of their abilities, and, because you own that time, you (let’s assume you’re the boss) feel the need to exercise your power of ownership.
Throughout American Grunt, Cramer shows us how that power dynamic plays out. There’s a common piece of advice memoir writers receive: Don’t write for revenge. Readers will find it petty. Yet here is the exception that proves the rule. Anyone who has ever hated their boss will take delight in his description of one boss as “an upright lizard of a human being with a bad combover and an absolutely brutal need for power and control.” When Cramer relates the full story of his time working as a guidance counselor where lizard man was the principal, we agree that yes, the man must have had scales.
He’s got colorful descriptions for the terrible bosses, but he’s quick to credit the ones who treat him like a human, the ones who acknowledge the work he puts in. Why are the good bosses so rare?
At its heart, this is a story of man with a noble work ethic looking to earn a living, but he also wants his work to mean something. Philosophers of labor have noted that work is defined by our actions that shape the world, the way we increase value in the world. In Bullshit Jobs, Graeber makes the argument that receiving a paycheck for work that the employee believes offers no real value is demoralizing. Most people who do bullshit jobs report high levels of stress, with all the accompanying ulcers and blood pressure.
It’s not surprising that Cramer keeps coming back to the sense of satisfaction he gets from manual labor, those jobs where you can see exactly what value you’ve added to the world, even if it doesn’t correlate to the number on a paycheck.
Vegetarian Ranchwife 