The Good Enough Job by Simone Stolzoff

Author:Simone Stolzoff [Stolzoff, Simone]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2023-05-23T00:00:00+00:00

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Mainstream depictions of overwork often feature business executives checking emails on vacation or Silicon Valley entrepreneurs coding late into the night. In the U.S. at least, busyness is more often valorized than disparaged. The gig platform Fiverr, for example, ran a 2017 ad campaign praising those who “eat a coffee for lunch” and choose “sleep deprivation as their drug of choice.”

It’s important to recognize, though, that the reasons Americans work long hours vary widely based on industry and class. For every Ryan Burge, who works so much because of the meaning he derives from his jobs, or Fobazi Ettarh, who works so much because of her employers’ outsized expectations, there is a twenty-four-year-old Josh: an exhausted employee who works long hours just to get by. According to a report from the Economic Policy Institute, the lowest-earning quintile of Americans worked nearly 25 percent more hours in 2016 than they did in 1979. As wages have stagnated for low-income Americans, they’ve had to work more hours to make ends meet.

Overwork is not simply a matter of the number of hours worked, but also the intensity and unpredictability of those hours. People in lower-paid jobs have less control over when, where, and how hard they work. At any moment, for instance, Derek DeRoche, a gig worker from Los Angeles, juggles requests from food-delivery, ride-hailing, and handyman platforms. When he’s not actively on the job, he must spend time figuring out his next gig—time for which he does not get paid. “I had to be available a lot for it to be a serious source of income,” he told me. “So much for being my own boss.”

Additionally, as Silicon Valley gig-based platforms expand overseas, so do the American working standards of their part-time workforce. Even in countries like Norway and Germany that have strong labor laws, gig workers are often classified as self-employed workers, which precludes them from full-time employment rights, such as the right to paid time off or the collective bargaining power of a union. The toll of long hours that often goes hand in hand with low-paid work is exacerbated by fewer protections—both from the gig platforms and from the state.

At twenty-five, Josh decided to leave his job at the airport. He found an administrative job at a local hospital that paid $12 an hour. Though the pay increase wasn’t life-changing, for the first time Josh was surrounded by people who were passionate about what they did. Josh organized the catered lunches during which doctors and residents discussed the most perplexing cases of the day, and he often stuck around to listen. “Being in the orbit of people who cared about how they spent their time to the point where they wanted to dedicate a ton of time to their job was novel,” he told me. “It challenged my ideas about what work could be.”

That said, medical residents might not be the ideal example of workers who want to work the hours they do. The medical residency model

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