When Did Our Jobs Turn into a Joke?

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To avert crisis, Kapstein and Marshall both call on the redeeming power of doing good work, of investing in skills and focusing on craftsmanship—which would require believing in the value of labor and the value of the laborer. Such a shift in mind-set could protect white-collar jobs, even transform domestic white-collar work. After all, the same technology that produced an outsourcing threat could just as easily make widespread telecommuting a reality. As Matt Bai writes in a November 2007 issue of the New York Times, “Why shouldn’t more middle-class workers whose jobs can now be done remotely have the option to structure their own hours and still enjoy the security of a safety net? Why shouldn’t . . . anyone who spends his day staring at a terminal in some sterile environment straight out of Office Space be able to work in shorts and spend more time around the kids?”

It’s a lovely vision, shedding all those vestiges of cliché office work (the inflexible hours, the fluorescent-lit cubicles, the impossible work-home balance), but it can’t happen if this generation of workers continue to find validation in checking out, backhandedly assuring themselves that they’re better than their disappointing jobs and, in the process, proving to their employers that they’re utterly replaceable and entirely outsourceable.

If white-collar workers seized this moment to check in, to believe in the value of their work and in themselves as workers, they might do more than save their jobs or even kick open the door for a reinvention of the workspace. They might remember what it feels like to care about what they do—or find out for the first time.

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