3 Things to Know about Labor this Labor Day

As we mark a national holiday to celebrate workers, we’re asking: how are Americans thinking about work?

Through our WorkShift project, we’ve been conducting in-depth interviews and large, representative national surveys to gain insight into this question. Here are three things we’ve found:

1. There is a disconnect between how people are thinking about the ‘economy’ and ‘jobs’.

Through our Culture Change Project we have found that Americans increasingly recognize that the economy is a system that is designed and shaped by government policies. (For instance, the idea that policies around things like taxes and trade determine how the economic system works, and that the system, in turn, shapes how people do in life). When it comes to thinking about jobs, however, people are overwhelmingly individualistic. Meaning—we don’t tend to see ‘the system’ when we think about who gets what job and how good those jobs are.

The most dominant mindset in conversations about work is that of ‘self-makingness’—that any individual can succeed if they just try hard and apply themselves. In the rare moments when the economy is part of conversations about work, people default to the idea of the invisible hand of the market—as if it is a natural force best left to its own devices, rather than a system we design.

So what? This raises the question of whether and how we can frame conversations about work in ways that highlight the important role of government action and public policies in shaping outcomes for workers. The main thing we need to do is help people widen the lens beyond jobs and put work into the context of a designed system. We also need to help people zoom out from thinking about why individuals succeed (i.e., ‘hard work’) to why there are different patterns of success for different groups of people.

2. The role of structural racism and sexism in shaping work is largely invisible. People often rely on stereotypes to understand why people of different genders might be in different professions.

When people think about the connection between work and racism, this is usually understood in terms of workplace interactions—for instance, in how people talk, make jokes, and think about their colleagues. In general, people aren’t thinking about racism structurally, in terms of how it is built into the design of our economy and reinforced through institutions and government policy priorities. So it is not a surprise that people rarely connect structural racism with work.

We find, particularly but not exclusively in white audiences, that people rely on several mindsets that deny or diminish the role of racism in shaping work. A particularly dominant and challenging mindset is that it’s ‘class, not race’ that really shapes employment outcomes. When class and race are pulled apart competitively like that, people can also endorse the ‘reverse racism’ mindset—that it’s actually the white working class who are being discriminated against now, because society has ‘overcorrected’ on race.

The role of structural sexism in shaping work is usually not in the picture. When thinking about care work, for example, people occasionally reach for a structural explanation of patterns (for instance, that sexism explains the over-representation of women in an undervalued profession). But more often we hear the trope that ‘women go into care work because they are naturally caring’. There is a surprising reliance on gender essentialism to understand why men and women might be in different jobs, and this likely points to a lack of understanding about other mechanisms to explain gendered patterns in the workforce.

So what? This shows that we have some explaining to do if we want people to understand the ways in which structural racism and sexism shape work. We cannot simply state that discrepancies exist when talking about things like over-or under-representation in certain jobs. If we appeal to facts without explanation, they are likely to be understood through the lens of people’s own individual (conscious or unconscious) biases regarding how the world works.

3. People hold conflicting mindsets about unions, but tend to agree that workers are stronger through unions. There is very little understanding of the role that unions played in securing the strong manufacturing jobs of the past.

The helpful mindset that workers are stronger through unions is widely endorsed across demographic groups and across the political aisle. Alongside this, people also think of unions as a corrupt and self-interested third party that sits between workers and employers, rather than being driven by workers themselves. When it comes to manufacturing, for example, people think that manufacturing jobs were better in the past, but tend not to recognize the role that unions have played—and can continue to play—in strengthening the industry. Americans’ knowledge of how unions work and leverage power is generally low.

So what? The challenge here is not so much to show that unions are a good thing, as to explain how workers can build power through unions. Our research to date shows that it’s helpful to be specific about the mechanisms by which unions do this—for instance, through securing contracts and going on strikes. We can also build understanding by connecting unions to examples of historical and current successes in the labor movement.

Follow us on the next steps of the WorkShift project, as we start to develop and test specific framing strategies that can build a more structural understanding of work—including the role that oppression plays in shaping work, and the role of government and unions in making change.

For further reading on how Americans are thinking about work, we invite you to check out our research conducted thus far here.