Please Don’t Call My Job a Calling | Simone Stolzoff | The New York Times, 5 June 2023 | Opinion
ioi_ab's bookmarks 2023-06-05
Summary:
"...The implication that love is a suitable stand-in for job security, workplace protections or fair pay is a commonly held belief, especially in so-called dream jobs like writing, cooking and working in the arts, where the privilege to do the work is seen as a form of compensation itself. But the rhetoric that a job is a passion or a “labor of love” obfuscates the reality that a job is an economic contract. The assumption that it isn’t sets up the conditions for exploitation.
...The idea that employees work for something other than money is also pervasive in industries that are geared toward helping people, such as education. “Teaching is a calling,” tweeted Mayor Eric Adams of New York City a few weeks ago. “You don’t do it for the money, you do it because you believe in the kids that come into your classrooms.”
That may sound like reverence, but the New York City teachers’ union contract expired last September, and Mr. Adams has resisted pay increases that keep up with inflation. Teachers need better compensation, not platitudes celebrating teacher appreciation week.
In a 2018 paper, Fobazi Ettarh, who at the time was a librarian, coined a term for how the perceived righteousness of her industry obscured the issues that existed within it. Ms. Ettarh called the phenomenon vocational awe, which she defined as the belief that as a workplace, libraries were inherently good, and therefore supposedly beyond critique. When a workplace is seen as virtuous, she claimed, it’s easier for workers to be exploited. “In the face of grand missions of literacy and freedom, advocating for your full lunch break feels petty,” she wrote....
This sense of duty and personal sacrifice can conflate workers’ output and their self-worth, as I chronicle in my new book, but it can also have a chilling effect on their willingness to surface wrongdoing. When you’re in a great job — one that you feel lucky to have — the fear of losing it can make it harder to speak up...."