What Makes a Person's Work Valuable?

In "Make Your Own Job," historian Erik Baker shows how entrepreneurialism defines how we value work.

During the early days of the pandemic lockdowns, the working population was divided into two categories, “essential” and “nonessential.” The essential workers risked their lives to stock supermarket shelves, wash dishes, bathe the sick, clean streets, and flip hamburgers. The rest of us stayed home and made sourdough bread. Sure, we later figured out alternate ways to attend budget meetings and marketing conferences, but the moment revealed something stark about our economic system: The lowest-paying, lowest-status jobs turned out to be the most necessary for the functioning of our society. Meanwhile, many high-paying, high-status jobs turned out to be… nonessential. As the late David Graeber pointed out in May 2020, it quickly became very clear that the world can get along just fine without mortgage brokers and brand managers, but we really need someone to pick up the garbage.

This distinction was forgotten quickly enough—underpaid people have limited time and bandwidth to advocate for themselves. We returned to our current value system that sees the most exulted forms of work associated with words like “innovation,” “creativity” and “entrepreneurialism.”

To do work that is merely useful is not enough; work should be a calling. The highest level of worker doesn’t simply trade their time and skills in exchange for money; rather, they take an “owner’s mentality” at the organizations they work for—while simultaneously crafting personal brands that will enable them to weather downsizing and layoffs from the companies they absolutely do not own.

In Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America, historian

Erik Baker

traces the canonization of entrepreneurship—and the idea that we should all take an entrepreneurial approach to our careers, whether or not we actually own businesses. He shows how self-help literature, business-school curriculums, management consultants, government leaders and blue-chip companies play a role in promoting this ethos. Baker:

The entrepreneurial work ethic insists that people who create their own work reap a set of intangible rewards that remain out of reach for the less proactive. They experience personal growth, or moral or psychological development. They acquire a set of virtues, including independence, initiative, creativity, integrity and self-realization, that are much harder to develop for people who simply do the work that others give them, even if they work very hard.

Baker shows that this idea is not new, and in his fascinating and dense history he follows its evolution, from the New Thought evangelists of the late 19^th century to today’s gig economy. Entrepreneurialism is even equated with democracy—the bold and optimistic Americans forging their destinies, in direct contrast with the submissive bureaucrats currying favor in authoritarian regimes.

I was particularly fascinated by the way the entrepreneurial work ethic infused some of the nation’s largest corporations, a process that accelerated in the late 20^th century.

At that time, American companies faced shrinking profit margins and increased competition from overseas rivals, and C-suite leaders sought advice from a growing cadre of management consultants. The solution, the consultants said, was innovation. “Any particular product line would eventually fall victim to competitive redundancy, so firms could only survive by churning out an incessant stream of new and attractive products,” writes Baker.

That shift changed the way corporations like General Electric and General Motors viewed their employees. As companies worked to transform themselves into innovation incubators, the people tasked with identifying new market opportunities and creating never-before-seen products and services became the organizations’ heroes—they were the “value creators.” Everyone else was… not. Baker:

Because value came from innovation rather than production or routine service, this category included jobs that might have struck uninitiated non-consultants as the fundamental work of the company: assembling cars, delivering packages, preparing food, and so on. It also included maintenance and administrative work, both at plants and corporate headquarters—custodial, cafeteria, secretarial employees whose work was essential to the functioning of the firm but who were expelled from the heroic circle of value creators.

The people who kept the organization running weren’t creating value, as defined by the consultants, the business press, and revered management gurus like Peter Drucker and Tom Peters. Rather than invest in these employees’ health insurance or pension plans, consultants prescribed a then-new concept called outsourcing. “Sell the mailroom!” said Drucker. “Subcontract everything but your soul!” said Peters.

If your job couldn’t be described with an adjective like “creative” or “trailblazing,” you were vulnerable to another new practice, downsizing. Companies worked to be “lean and mean” and “shed the fat”—middle managers, support staff, and entire divisions that were profitable but not top market performers. The layoff survivors—the “muscle”—might have been heroes, but they were also increasingly overworked, as a growing percentage of the managerial strata started working “extreme jobs” of 60 hours or more per week. But it was OK because, you know, they weren’t just doing jobs—they were fulfilling their destinies, forging new paths, changing the world.

As bungled and crude as the DOGE firings have been, the basic premise that a wealthy business owner has better judgment than a government employee has been baked into our cultural consciousness for a very long time. In Make Your Own Job, Baker meticulously tracks how we got here.

The current administration has targeted the people we’ve been trained to view as dullardly desk jockeys, people who don’t create but merely maintain—ensuring that Social Security checks are delivered, national parks are clean and safe, and air and water are protected from pollutants. As we watch the bureaucrats—the word itself a pejorative—get their pink slips it becomes painfully clear that they’re losing their jobs not because their work doesn’t matter, but because it does.