Alternative Outline and Thesis Approach That Focuses on an Argument
Paragraph 1: using appropriate signal phrases, summarize and paraphrase Derek Thompson’s essay “The Religion of Workism Is Making Americans Miserable.”
Paragraph 2: Develop a thesis that critiques, agrees, or disagrees with Derek Thompson's essay based on ethos, logos, and pathos.
Paragraphs 3-6: Explain your objections to Thompson's essay in terms of ethos, logos, and pathos.
Paragraphs 7-8: Counterarguments and rebuttals
Paragraph 9: Conclusion
The last page is your Works Cited with a minimum of 4 sources.
Objection #1: Failure to provide context
I concede that Thompson does a good job of showing the turnaround regarding leisure time as an asset of the rich and privileged. Leisure time used to be the main objective of success, but now Workism makes being overworked a success symbol and a way of achieving domination in one's field. However, this choice to engage in Workism needs context. For example, if a small number of upper-class workers are ditching leisure time for the status symbol of Workism, why should we care when the majority of workers are suffering overwhelming forces, such as abuse on the job, that lead to real job burnout?
Would not Derek Thompson achieve more ethos (credibility) and pathos (sympathy) if he framed Workism in the context of real job burnout?
Objection #2: Proportion Fallacy
How widespread is Workism compared to real job burnout? If Workism is small compared to real job burnout, why should we care? Should not Thompson put Workism in the context of real job burnout to gain more credibility and sympathy for his argument?
Objection #3: Monolith Fallacy
Is it lame to lump all Workism in the same category? Is not Thompson's argument weakened by his failure to discern between healthy, mindful Workism (which he himself does) and mindless, reckless, self-destructive Workism? Is not treating all Workism as one type, a monolith, a convenient way to support his argument when this monolith contradicts reality?
Objection #4: Extreme Fallacy
It is self-evident that if you give extreme cases of anything, the thing is unhealthy. Workism in the extreme is unhealthy, but so is eating.
We need food and we need meaningful work, but extreme approaches to eating and working are not healthy.
Is this not so obvious and self-evident as to not even require our attention?
Objection #5: Mountain out of a Molehill Fallacy
Is not Thompson creating a false issue, making a mountain out of a molehill, to write a clickbait essay for The Atlantic? How much should I care about professionals choosing to work themselves to death when there are greater numbers of workers with less privilege suffering job burnout for reasons they cannot control?
Objection #6: Failure to Blame the Primary Cause
Thompson cites the fall of religion and community as the cause of a spiritual vacuum that is filled with Workism, but what if there is a cause behind the fall of religion and community? What if the failing American dream causes workers to burn out and leaves them no time for religion and community? We could conclude that Workism is not a moral choice but a survival necessity.
1C Essay #2 Due October 22
Workism and Groupthink Compromise Critical Thinking and Exploits Employees
The Assignment
Read Derek Thompson's essay "The Religion of Workism Is Making Americans Miserable."
Then compare the idea of Workism, especially how employers rely on manipulation and Groupthink to exploit their employees, in relation to one or more of the following documentaries and TV shows: WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn, The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, and Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened, and Severance. For your comparison of Thompson’s essay and the documentaries or TV shows, develop a thesis that addresses the claim that fraudsters rely on Workism and Groupthink to create a colossal breakdown of critical thinking that causes employees, investors, and customers to become dangerously gullible to the false promises of these mad grifters. As a result, the employees are exploited. Is the following claim legitimate? Why or why not? Explain. Be sure to have a counterargument-rebuttal section in your essay before you reach your conclusion.
Suggested Essay Outline
Paragraph 1: Summarize Derek Thompson’s essay about Workism.
Paragraph 2: Your thesis: Develop a claim that the causes of Workism are the following:
- The rise of the fraudster who relies on a mythical origin story about creating disruptive change that makes for a better world.
- The prevalence of Groupthink in the workplace makes workers malleable.
- The prevalence of toxic positivity in the workplace is used to manipulate workers.
- The prevalence of pseudo-spirituality in the workplace tethers employees to work while they disconnect from family and community and this creates a vicious cycle.
- The prevalence of the Ubermensch ethic as described by Anne Helen Petersen chains employees to a burnout work cycle.
Paragraphs 3-7 address the above bullet points.
Paragraphs 8 and 9: Counterargument and Rebuttal
Some will argue that economic necessity in a hyper-competitive field that makes success a zero-sum game to be the real reason of Workism, not the above. Do you concede that point? Do you reject it? Why? Why not?
Paragraph 10: Conclusion, a reiteration of your thesis.
Works Cited with 4 sources in MLA format.
Study Guide for Derek Thompson’s “Workism Is Making Americans Miserable,” Part 1
Leisure Time Has Become an Obsolescent Idea
Derek Thompson begins his essay by observing that leisure time was supposed to be a significant benefit of success, that the college-educated worker could enjoy a 15-hour work week.
With the 15-hour work week, we could unchain our identities from our jobs and create a parallel world in the arts, hobbies, or other passions, which would become the new reservoir of our new identity.
The Higher the Income Tier, the More Hours You Work
While for many Americans, the work week has indeed shortened, there is one group for which the work week has actually lengthened to at least 65 hours: highly-skilled, college-educated workers who earn the top tier of income in America.
For middle-tier wage earners, the job is a necessary tool to get money to pay for basic expenses: food, gas, shelter, and medical bills.
However, the upper-tier earners work more and have embraced the cult of Workism, meaning that work is not just a source of income, but a major source of self-worth and identity. As Thompson observes:
The economists of the early 20th century did not foresee that work might evolve from a means of material production to a means of identity production. They failed to anticipate that, for the poor and middle class, work would remain a necessity; but for the college-educated elite, it would morph into a kind of religion, promising identity, transcendence, and community. Call it workism.
Work Fills the Spiritual or Existential Vacuum
Thompson posits that we all worship something: our god, our family, ambition, money, self-aggrandizement, love, social media status, fast cars, and even donuts. We may say we’ve “lost our religion,” but in reality, some kind of religion always replaces another, including “The Gospel of Work.” In the words of Thompson:
The decline of traditional faith in America has coincided with an explosion of new atheisms. Some people worship beauty, some worship political identities, and others worship their children. But everybody worships something. And workism is among the most potent of the new religions competing for congregants.
What is workism? It is the belief that work is not only necessary to economic production, but also the centerpiece of one’s identity and life’s purpose; and the belief that any policy to promote human welfare must always encourage more work.
Without Work, We Languish in Emptiness and Despair and Feel Like Pariahs
Thompson is arguing that for the college-educated Workism is essential to their self-worth, sense of belonging, identity, and anchoring: not family, not religion, not friendship, but Workism.
The frenzied charge to enhance our self-worth through our work is uniquely American and reflects longer work hours than in other countries. As Thompson writes:
No large country in the world as productive as the United States averages more hours of work a year. And the gap between the U.S. and other countries is growing. Between 1950 and 2012, annual hours worked per employee fell by about 40 percent in Germany and the Netherlands—but by only 10 percent in the United States. Americans “work longer hours, have shorter vacations, get less in unemployment, disability, and retirement benefits, and retire later, than people in comparably rich societies,” wrote Samuel P. Huntington in his 2005 book Who Are We?: The Challenges to America’s National Identity.
One group has led the widening of the workist gap: rich men.
In 1980, the highest-earning men actually worked fewer hours per week than middle-class and low-income men, according to a survey by the Minneapolis Fed. But that’s changed. By 2005, the richest 10 percent of married men had the longest average workweek. In that same time, college-educated men reduced their leisure time more than any other group. Today, it is fair to say that elite American men have transformed themselves into the world’s premier workaholics, toiling longer hours than both poorer men in the U.S. and rich men in similarly rich countries.
More Work Hours Is a Pathological Power Grab
It seems that America’s high earners have punked themselves: They compete to be the hardest worker and put in the longest hours because to be a workaholic is to be superior to other workers. As we read in Thompson’s essay:
This shift defies economic logic—and economic history. The rich have always worked less than the poor, because they could afford to. The landed gentry of preindustrial Europe dined, danced, and gossiped, while serfs toiled without end. In the early 20th century, rich Americans used their ample downtime to buy weekly movie tickets and dabble in sports. Today’s rich American men can afford vastly more downtime. But they have used their wealth to buy the strangest of prizes: more work!
Perhaps long hours are part of an arms race for status and income among the moneyed elite. Or maybe the logic here isn’t economic at all. It’s emotional—even spiritual. The best-educated and highest-earning Americans, who can have whatever they want, have chosen the office for the same reason that devout Christians attend church on Sundays: It’s where they feel most themselves. “For many of today’s rich there is no such thing as ‘leisure’; in the classic sense—work is their play,” the economist Robert Frank wrote in The Wall Street Journal. “Building wealth to them is a creative process, and the closest thing they have to fun.”
Workism Is Part of America’s Dystopian Public Policy
Americans fetishize long work hours so much that we have no political will to give workers time off, lengthy vacations, and paternity leave. We offer the most abysmal time-off in the industrial world. We also punish Americans for being unemployed by cutting them off of medical benefits. We seem to have created this dystopian hell for the working poor but rationalize that if only “they would get with the program” and join the Workism Cult they could reap the awards of the American Dream. In the words of Derek Thompson:
Even as Americans worship workism, its leaders consecrate it from the marble daises of Congress and enshrine it in law. Most advanced countries give new parents paid leave; but the United States guarantees no such thing. Many advanced countries ease the burden of parenthood with national policies; but U.S. public spending on child care and early education is near the bottom of international rankings. In most advanced countries, citizens are guaranteed access to health care by their government; but the majority of insured Americans get health care through—where else?—their workplace. Automation and AI may soon threaten the labor force, but America’s welfare system has become more work-based in the past 20 years. In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which replaced much of the existing welfare system with programs that made benefits contingent on the recipient’s employment.
Study Guide for Derek Thompson’s “Workism Is Making Americans Miserable,” Part 2
Work Is Essential to the Soul But Is There a Point of Diminishing Returns
Thompson is not arguing against work per se; he actually argues that long-term unemployment may be more egregious to the spirit than the loss of a loved one. A certain amount of work is important for structure, focus, self-worth, belonging, and pride.
But what Thompson is questioning is the elevation of a job to something more than a way to make money to pay the bills. It may not be, as Work Cultists would have us believe, be a calling or a platform for self-actualization. In the words of Thompson:
There is nothing wrong with work, when work must be done. And there is no question that an elite obsession with meaningful work will produce a handful of winners who hit the workist lottery: busy, rich, and deeply fulfilled. But a culture that funnels its dreams of self-actualization into salaried jobs is setting itself up for collective anxiety, mass disappointment, and inevitable burnout.
In the past century, the American conception of work has shifted from jobs to careers to callings—from necessity to status to meaning. In an agrarian or early-manufacturing economy, where tens of millions of people perform similar routinized tasks, there are no delusions about the higher purpose of, say, planting corn or screwing bolts: It’s just a job.
McMahon’s Take: College Applications and Origin Stories
It seems that applying to colleges is rooted in the Job-As-Self-Actualization Myth. When you apply to a college, you have to write a Personal Statement letter, which is nothing less than a Superhero Origin Story about how you found your Life Calling. If you don’t have such a dramatic story that brands you as a Special Person with a Calling, you will find your application gets thrown away and you will be replaced by a student who plays the game and writes a phony origin story.
In other words, colleges are contributing to Workism. Thompson omits this important fact. Colleges are invested in selling meaning and transcendence to prospective students just like the purveyors of business.
What Thompson analyzes in the workplace could be equally applied to the university:
“We’ve created this idea that the meaning of life should be found in work,” says Oren Cass, the author of the book The Once and Future Worker. “We tell young people that their work should be their passion. ‘Don’t give up until you find a job that you love!’ we say. ‘You should be changing the world!’ we tell them. That is the message in commencement addresses, in pop culture, and frankly, in media, including The Atlantic.”
But our desks were never meant to be our altars. The modern labor force evolved to serve the needs of consumers and capitalists, not to satisfy tens of millions of people seeking transcendence at the office. It’s hard to self-actualize on the job if you’re a cashier—one of the most common occupations in the U.S.—and even the best white-collar roles have long periods of stasis, boredom, or busywork. This mismatch between expectations and reality is a recipe for severe disappointment, if not outright misery, and it might explain why rates of depression and anxiety in the U.S. are “substantially higher” than they were in the 1980s, according to a 2014 study.
The Two Traumus of Millennials and Subsequent Generations
Thompson writes that Millennials have amassed huge student debt to make sure they are armed with sufficient degrees and credentials in the competitive workforce. When you are in debt for over two decades, if not a lifetime, for your student loans, you want your job to be larger than life, to possess secret sauce, and unlock the secrets of the universe. Your job has to be far more than money to be to afford food and shelter.
Additionally, Millennials and subsequent generations have social media, which puts pressure on us to curate a successful life, one rich with fulfillment, meaning, and self-actualization. In the words of Thompson:
While it’s inadvisable to paint 85 million people with the same brush, it’s fair to say that American Millennials have been collectively defined by two external traumas. The first is student debt. Millennials are the most educated generation ever, a distinction that should have made them rich and secure. But rising educational attainment has come at a steep price. Since 2007, outstanding student debt has grown by almost $1 trillion, roughly tripling in just 12 years. And since the economy cratered in 2008, average wages for young graduates have stagnated—making it even harder to pay off loans.
The second external trauma of the Millennial generation has been the disturbance of social media, which has amplified the pressure to craft an image of success—for oneself, for one’s friends and colleagues, and even for one’s parents. But literally visualizing career success can be difficult in a services and information economy. Blue-collar jobs produce tangible products, like coal, steel rods, and houses. The output of white-collar work—algorithms, consulting projects, programmatic advertising campaigns—is more shapeless and often quite invisible. It’s not glib to say that the whiter the collar, the more invisible the product.
Since the physical world leaves few traces of achievement, today’s workers turn to social media to make manifest their accomplishments. Many of them spend hours crafting a separate reality of stress-free smiles, postcard vistas, and Edison-lightbulbed working spaces. “The social media feed [is] evidence of the fruits of hard, rewarding labor and the labor itself,” Petersen writes.
“Do What You Love” Is a Lie That Targets the “Meaning Junkies”
Thompson refers to Erin Griffith’s New York Times essay “Why Are Young People Pretending to Love Work?” in which she shows a generation of young people working at WeWork with “Do What You Love” pillows and they’re all miserable and burned out.
Millennials are “meaning junkies” who need to find a higher purpose at work, a job that justifies all the student debt they’ve accrued. And this meaning must be curated on social media so the whole world can see how fulfilled and spiritually together they are. This makes them ripe for exploitation. We see this exploitation at WeWork, Theranos, and the Fyre Festival fiasco.
This exploitation is justified by Workism, which lines the pockets of the elite rich. As we read:
The problem with this gospel—Your dream job is out there, so never stop hustling—is that it’s a blueprint for spiritual and physical exhaustion. Long hours don’t make anybody more productive or creative; they make people stressed, tired and bitter. But the overwork myths survive “because they justify the extreme wealth created for a small group of elite techies,” Griffith writes.
Derek Thompson and Ethos
To give himself some humility and credibility in his essay, Thompson makes a confession: He himself is a practitioner of the Cult of Workism. He writes:
This is the right time for a confession. I am the very thing that I am criticizing.
I am devoted to my job. I feel most myself when I am fulfilled by my work—including the work of writing an essay about work. My sense of identity is so bound up in my job, my sense of accomplishment, and my feeling of productivity that bouts of writer’s block can send me into an existential funk that can spill over into every part of my life. And I know enough writers, tech workers, marketers, artists, and entrepreneurs to know that my affliction is common, especially within a certain tranche of the white-collar workforce.
The Reality of Workism
Thompson concedes it’s true that a culture that produces Workism produces some of the best innovations in the world, but it’s also true that 87% of American workers are not engaged at work. Think about that: Eighty-seven % of the workers are disaffected, afflicted with job boredom, burnout, and ennui.
Conclusion: America Needs More Paid Leave and More Work Balance
Thompson argues in his conclusion that as a country America must change its public policy: More paid leave, more paternity leave, better medical coverage for the employed and unemployed alike, and better work balance, which means you work to “buy free time.”
In the end, while some of us are work superstars like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, and others, about 90% of us will work to pay the bills, not as a higher calling. We need to live in reality, not fantasy.
Work Pray Code Study Guide Part 1
Work Pray Code: When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley
Part 1
Work as a Religious Community
Carolyn Chen writes that work has become the new religion, a place where employees go to find meaning, transcendence, and deep connections with others.
This meaning quest seems like an excuse to abandon family and community and become a workaholic. As workers find “meaning” at work, they become more disconnected from family and community, and this compels them to insulate themselves into even more work, thus creating a vicious cycle.
So Workism is really not a meaning quest. It’s a canard or a smokescreen for blind ambition dressed up with the perfume of fake meaning.
There are consequences to turning work into a religious place of sacred worship.
Some argue that The Great Resignation is a sign that workers are abandoning Work-As-Religion, but Carolyn Chen in her book that the hunger for finding meaning and community at work has never been stronger, based on her interviews with people who work in Silicon Valley.
The Whipped Cream of Fake Spirituality
Many of these employees and employers hire Buddhist mindful counselors and spiritual advisers as if having such spiritual leaders is a requirement for both substance and image in such workplaces.
Even Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and Walmart hire chaplains to address the employees’ spiritual needs.
An argument can be made that this veneer of work spirituality is evil because it encourages workers to kiss the butt of blind ambition while consoling themselves with pretentious notions of spirituality through cheap and hollow adages, aphorisms, and quotes from holy texts.
In other words, these employees are gaslighting themselves with cheap religious bromides.
Why Is There Religion or Pseudo Religion at the Workplace?
In 1990, 8% of Americans said they have no religious affiliation. Today that number has jumped to 25%. As a result, Chen observes that Americans don’t go to work to sell their souls but to find their souls.
People cannot bear living in a spiritual vacuum, so if they abandon their traditional religion, they will feel compelled to replace it with a new spirituality, even if it means finding “religion” in the workplace.
As a result, there is no work-life balance. Now a 65-hour work week is “typical.”
Work becomes the god. This false god is just a smokescreen for blind ambition.
In Before Times, Work Was Soul-Crushing
In contrast, white-collar work in the 50s was soul-crushing and Americans found peace and connection in their religious community.
There was a strong demarcation line: work in one part of your life and the spiritual existence of the church, community, and family life on the other.
Community Erodes
Now that the religious community is eroding, work is taking the place of such a community.
Those in the upper-income brackets are more likely to like their jobs and see their workplace as a spiritual haven.
Branding Yourself and Giving Yourself an Origin Story
The job sites have a mission, a higher purpose, and even like Marvel superheroes, an “origin story.” In the new global economy, if you don’t have an origin story to strengthen your brand, you are irrelevant.
These origin stories are based on mythologies.
You hit rock bottom, you lose everything, you fall into a pit of despair, you’ve gone down some rabbit hole of confusion; and just then when all seems lost, you see in some crag or nook or cranny this beam of the True Light that leads you to the True Path. Once embarked upon the True Path, you can save the world, find personal redemption, and adopt a three-legged rescue dog named Patsy.
All origin stories are a variation of the above.
Writing for The Verge in her essay “Therano’s Greatest Invention Was Elizabeth Holmes,” Elizabeth Lopatto writes:
The Holmes persona checked off boxes that Silicon Valley’s startup world loves to fawn over. Dropout from a prestigious school? Check. Obsessed with work, to the point of having no personal life? Check. Under the age of 32? Check. (Paul Graham in 2013, describing what Silicon Valley VCs look for: “The cutoff in investors’ heads is 32.” Also: “I can be tricked by anyone who looks like Mark Zuckerberg.”) Only hobby is exercise? Check. Steve Jobs worship? Check. Unnecessary secrecy around your innovation? In tech, secrecy around new inventions is the norm.
What’s interesting about the Elizabeth Holmes character is how she fit in with this founder myth, since she was, you know, female. But a specific kind of woman: low voice, only wears pants, high-neck shirt, clumsy makeup. Not like those other girls. She began to grace magazine covers during a period shortly after Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg published Lean In, a misguided book about how the solution to misogyny is simply working harder, and around the time Sophia Amoruso published Girlboss, a 2014 book about founding an online discount clothing store.
The Lean In / girlboss period was a kind of response to tech’s image as a bunch of smelly bros in hoodies. Conditions on the ground for lower-level engineers were often full of sexual harassment. What’s more, women rarely got money: in 2019, 2.8 percent of VC funds went to female founders, an all-time high. These are large, systemic issues! And rather than talk about them, the corporate world elected to bring us inspiration, as though the only thing stopping women from building their own CEO destinies was a lack of role models.
And then there was Holmes. She was, conveniently, a woman succeeding in Silicon Valley, a place some people had suggested was possibly sexist due to things such as Paul Graham’s aforementioned Zuckerberg comment, Ellen Pao’s lawsuit against VC firm Kleiner Perkins, and Travis Kalanick’s “boober” incident.
Holmes’ fall from grace was the first crack in the founder myth. It was followed by Travis Kalanick being booted from Uber over the culture of sexual harassment, bullying, and general lawlessness he’d built. More flamboyantly, Adam Neumann of WeWork was forced out after the company filed frankly deranged paperwork for its IPO, which was then called off. Those three founders had borrowed the notes of tech hype for products that were, well, not tech: Theranos was (at least in theory) medicine, Uber is a car service with a nice app, and WeWork is a real estate company. During this heady period, though, investors tended to overlook tech-hyped things that weren’t actually tech.
Even College Students Need Origin Stories to Create a Brand
Even college students writing personal statements to get into high-tier universities fabricate an elaborate origin story to strengthen their brand.
We live in a world where we are on social media and creating a brand for ourselves. This brand may be BS, but over time we will come to believe in it.
Work As Friendship and Emotional Support System
Chen quotes sociologist Arlie Hochschild who reports that today more Americans are meeting their social needs more at work than they are in their families.
If this is true, then what is the motivation to stay in a family, if not literally then at least in terms of time given to that family? Would not someone who finds love and friendship at work be prone to spend as little time with family as possible?
Chen is making the case that the rise of business as a place to meet love, spiritual, friendship, and emotional needs is taking the place of religion and even the family.
Who’s the Team Player in This Scenario?
Do I look to my job for emotional fulfillment?
I love my job and the people I work with and my students, but the fact that I’d rather be home with my family is such that some co-workers might grumble, “He’s not a team player. For McMahon, the apotheosis of love and meaning must come from work. Family is second.”
This sounds insane.
The More Educated and High-Income You Are, The More You Embrace the Workplace as Your Spiritual Haven
Chen traces a direct line between high income and the job site as a place of spiritual meaning, identity, and connection.
Richard Florida calls these job sites “human capital clusters.” They are mostly in big cities like Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, and Chicago. The workplace has gourmet buffet, yoga centers, wellness centers, gyms, tracks, meditation retreats, self-esteem therapists, sleeping quarters, busses that come to your house, barista cafes, organic gardens, vegan and homemade pasta cooking lessons, media entertainment centers, deep-tissue massage, hand-crafted IPA and wine bars, and spiritual counseling repurposed to make you more productive. These are One-Size-Fits-All Nanny Centers. They suffocate you, yet you love it.
Chen observes that the higher up the ladder the employee climbs the more likely they are to abandon religion, but their religious needs have not disappeared; “they have been displaced.”
Techtopia
Chen coins the term Techtopia: an engineered society that gives people the highest fulfillment at work by colonizing the functions of other social institutions.
In other words, the spiritual nourishment of the holy temples and family has been spiritually appropriated by work.
Tech Migrants Are Not Just Paying the Bills
Most of the workers Chen interviewed are tech migrants, those who traveled great distances to work in the tech industry. They left friends and family behind. Therefore, they are hungry for connection, and they find it at work.
In the tech industry, a job is more than paying your bills: It’s your identity and your brand. You can never work hard enough to cultivate your identity and your brand. The employer has you right where they want you.
Why You Need Faith
You have to believe in yourself in the tech industry. Either you will become a billionaire and win a big IPO or get bought by Facebook or Microsoft or something equally big, but all the while you know that over 90% of start-ups fail. Therefore, you need lots of faith. You have to believe in the Purpose and the Mission. You have to drink your own Kool-Aid.
All the missions are the same: “My product will bring people together and change the world.”
Any worker who doesn’t drink the Kool-Aid of the above mantra is a nonbeliever, a malcontent who must be expelled from the premises.
Corporate Maternalism
The corporation suffocates you with “love” and all-day care and expects a return on their investment. “The personal is the profession” is the mantra.
The goals of corporate maternalism are threefold: strengthen emotional bonds to the company, help employees avoid job burnout, and obscure the line between the boss and the underlying in order to create a family atmosphere.
Corporate maternalism become a form of authoritarianism and in its extreme, it is the influence of the hit Apple TV show Severance.
In Carolyn Chen’s readable book Work Pray Code, she chronicles the workplace as a “Techtopia” where all of one’s emotional, spiritual, and physical needs are met by “corporate maternalism.” One of the key features of corporate maternalism is feeding your employees. As an employee at a hot tech company, you can eat breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks from a celebrity gourmet chef and be so satisfied that you don’t even have to waste time and money on grocery shopping. You don’t even have to go home to face meal preparation or kitchen cleanup. The perk attracts talent and keeps it there.
If that’s not a perk to stay on the job, I don’t know what is.
However, Chen observes that corporate maternalism is often phony. She asks the question: What use is a yoga studio when your boss wants you to work 16 hours a day?
Toxic Positivity
Another symptom of corporate maternalism is toxic positivity in which the employees are pressured, often through implicit means, to force a smile and curate a persona of glee and happiness in order to persuade everyone that the company is legit.
Be Your Best Self equals Work Your Butt Off Without Complaining.
“We want you to be your best self, go deep into your soul, and find out who you are.” What this really means is we want you to give us your blood, sweat, and tears, and smile while you’re doing it.
Book Review of Toxic Positivity
Some Helpful Videos:
“Toxic Positivity: The Reality of Suppressing Emotions”
“The Shadow of Toxic Positivity”
Review Outline
Suggested Essay Outline
Paragraph 1: Summarize Derek Thompson’s essay about Workism.
Paragraph 2: Your thesis: Develop a claim that the causes of Workism are the following:
- The rise of the fraudster who relies on a mythical origin story about creating disruptive change that makes for a better world.
- The prevalence of Groupthink in the workplace makes workers malleable.
- The prevalence of toxic positivity in the workplace is used to manipulate workers.
- The prevalence of pseudo-spirituality in the workplace tethers employees to work while they disconnect from family and community and this creates a vicious cycle.
- The prevalence of the Ubermensch ethic as described by Anne Helen Petersen chains employees to a burnout work cycle.
Paragraphs 3-7 address the above bullet points.
Paragraphs 8 and 9: Counterargument and Rebuttal
Some will argue that economic necessity in a hyper-competitive field that makes success a zero-sum game to be the real reason of Workism, not the above. Do you concede that point? Do you reject it? Why? Why not?
Paragraph 10: Conclusion, a reiteration of your thesis.
Works Cited with 4 sources in MLA format.
If you disagree with what’s written below, then it will be a counterargument in your essay.
However, if you agree with the following points, then your thesis will very similar to them.
Some arguments that serve to disagree with the causes of Workism that we have studied in this class:
Thesis Samples, Part 2
Sample #1:
While it’s true that there is toxic positivity, pseudo-spirituality, and fraudsters at many worksites, these sideshows distract us from the real cause of job burnout, which is the zero-sum game of hyper-competitive capitalism.
Sample #2
I will concede with Derek Thompson, Carolyn Chen, and others that the workplace has become a false path for finding meaning, but most of hard-working Americans are not getting suckered by CEO fraudsters and their ilk; rather, we are working our butts off because of economic necessity.
Sample #3
Finding your niche at work and getting meaning from that is not some kind of bad thing as McMahon has framed it in this class. Come on, McMahon, stop discouraging us from finding a meaningful, fulfilling job, and instead help us use our critical thinking skills for something valuable. I’m dropping your class.
Sample #4
McMahon has done us a service by making us question putting too much emotional investment at work as a place for meaning. He’s really got me thinking about the life-work balance, and how I don’t want to lose that balance by becoming some sort of slavish devotee to my job. However, as much as I love McMahon’s amazing teaching skills and his captivating and engrossing class discussions, I take issue with his notion that Workism is some sort of phony Meaning Quest. Workism is a symptom of America’s economic failures, which pressure most Americans like myself to run on the work treadmill just so we don’t get behind.
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