Work Ethic

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WORK ETHIC

The term work ethic refers to efforts to apply oneself diligently to the task at hand. The application of the work ethic became important during the industrial revolution when a majority of people gradually began to work for wages. The work ethic contained a strong moral dimension by promoting the spiritual idea of "living to work" rather than "working to live." According to historian Daniel T. Rodgers, the work ethic placed work at the center of moral life—work made people useful in a world of economic scarcity. In fact, the work ethic, while still an icon of lip service, had already been substantially under- mined before the Depression began. The needs of the mass production economy that came into its own in the 1920s required an emphasis on consumption that severely weakened the work ethic.

Nonetheless, during the Great Depression, many politicians and business leaders feared that the traditional work ethic was being undermined by the economic situation that many people found themselves in, and it was threatened even more by many of the proposed solutions to that situation. For this reason, most of the New Deal programs that aimed to assist individuals economically, including the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and the Works Progress Administration (WPA), required that recipients work for the assistance that they received. Even Social Security, a pay-as-yougo program, was sold to the American public as a program for which people "earned" credit, even though the money that an individual paid into the system was immediately dispersed to someone else.

Although the United States was an advanced industrial nation at the onset of the Great Depression, it had one of the most rudimentary social welfare systems. The unemployed and underprivileged had to rely on private charity or local (city or county) welfare systems. The severity of the economic malaise during the early years of the Great Depression quickly taxed this system beyond its capacity to respond; many industrial cities found that they had to reduce essential services, like fire and police departments, in order to simply feed their citizens. President Herbert Hoover's insistence on a program of "voluntarism" meant that he discouraged any legislation that would provide additional funds to supplement these programs. When Franklin D. Roosevelt assumed office in 1933, one of the earliest agencies established was the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), headed by Harry Hopkins. FERA's purpose was to provide funds to states so that they could supplement the funds being dispersed locally. Much of the money was to be augmented by state and local governments, particularly those in the north, since southern states provided little or no support or social welfare.

Concern both inside and outside the administration that this program would undermine the work ethic, and demean those receiving such assistance "for nothing," quickly led to the creation of programs like the CCC. The purpose of the CCC was, in part, to rescue young men from "dangerous" influences in the city, such as criminal gangs and Communists, and relocate them to the countryside, where the work ethic could be instilled in them through projects such as building roads, digging ditches, and planting trees. Similar programs, such as the Civil Works Administration (CWA) and the WPA, eventually put millions of men and women to work on a variety of public works projects, ranging from road-building to writing travel guides to the states.

Franklin Roosevelt envisioned Social Security as a "cradle to grave" social welfare system, but the political realities of the time, as well as Roosevelt's need to use his political capital judiciously to coax recalcitrant southern congressmen to support the New Deal, prevented Roosevelt's vision from becoming a reality. The need to retain as many southern votes as possible for Social Security legislation meant that in exchange for those votes Congress excluded farm and domestic workers, a part of the labor force that in the 1930s largely consisted of women and African-American men. The old-age pension system was funded exclusively by contributors through a new tax levied by the federal government, while unemployment and aid to families with dependent children were funded by matching contributions from the federal government to state governments. This led to widely varying levels of aid from state to state, with the greatest disparity being between northern states (supplying greater amounts of aid) and southern states (supplying lesser amounts).

Some critics of these New Deal initiatives have argued that the Roosevelt administration under- took them in a cynical attempt to undermine more radical political possibilities; defenders of the New Deal argue that these limitations were imposed on the administration by the political realities of the time. On the contrary, until this point in the history of the United States, the federal government had largely left individual citizens of the nation to shift for themselves during times of economic distress, and it was the expectation of a large number of people that the poor would have to continue to rely on their work ethic to see them through this latest crisis.

See Also: COLLECTIVE BARGAINING; INDIVIDUALISM.