Luke Ford

The New Yorker, May 1, 2024:

New books examine the place of work in our lives—and how people throughout history have tried to change it.

…The case against the dictatorship of bosses is, in fact, so ironclad that some business leaders have adopted it as a talking point. Their solution, however, is not union power or collective worker ownership of the means of production but, rather, self-employment. Benjamin C. Waterhouse, a historian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a deft chronicler of executive-class escapades, tells the history of this clever ideological maneuver in his new book, “One Day I’ll Work for Myself: The Dream and Delusion That Conquered America.” The rise of neoliberal policymaking in the U.S. channelled the conservative work ethic––preaching submission to higher-ups and the embrace of drudgery––and, as Waterhouse shows, it also channelled what I call the entrepreneurial work ethic, the idealization of the self-employed and self-actualizing job creator as a model for much of the workforce to emulate.

Contrary to popular belief, the aspiration to self-employment is not intrinsic to the American character—it has a history. In Waterhouse’s telling, it is a product of the late twentieth century, particularly the economic crises of the seventies and eighties. During the prosperous decades after the Second World War, Waterhouse states, working for oneself wasn’t particularly appealing. Large corporations could afford to be relatively generous, at least to those workers (mostly white, mostly male) who executives felt were entitled to a decent standard of living. Workers desired, above all, a piece of this pie, which meant they often dreamed about “working for someone else.” In the March on Washington, Waterhouse writes, poor Black workers demanded not only “freedom” but “jobs,” a slogan which he contrasts with Richard Nixon’s program, a few years later, for “minority business enterprise.” At the other end of the class hierarchy, the young élites featured by William Whyte in “The Organization Man” evinced little interest in going into business by themselves, focussing their energies instead on climbing the corporate ladder.

Then, in the seventies, things fell apart: stagflation, oil shocks, jobless recoveries, financial turmoil. “The big, hierarchical corporations that had bestrode the business landscape in the 1950s and 1960s looked like outdated relics,” Waterhouse writes. The nation began to hearken to a new generation of business gurus and management experts who claimed that “the road to renewed growth would be paved by those brave risk-takers who embraced change and started their own companies.” The M.I.T. economist David Birch produced widely cited statistics popularizing the idea that small businesses were responsible for the vast majority of job creation in the U.S.––as high as eighty per cent. Birch’s studies had major methodological issues, as critics soon pointed out, and his findings were difficult to replicate, but the basic idea still rang true for a lot of Americans. “When upward promotion at a traditional job became out of reach for so many people,” as Waterhouse explains, the American Dream seemed to require “building a business yourself (or buying one), and reaping the rewards.”

Major corporations in industries like fast food and direct selling adopted organizational schemes such as franchising and independent contracting to depict themselves as engines of small-business creation, even when they continued to exert significant control over the working conditions and decision-making of their ostensibly “entrepreneurial” workforce. (The parallels to today’s gig-economy platforms are impossible to miss.) People who actually gave self-employment a try often found more of the same toil and precarity from which they hoped business ownership would allow them to escape.