3 Reasons Job Shaming Is Evil and Your Work Has Value
Have you ever judged someone because of their job or felt ashamed because your job wasn’t considered valuable enough?
Earlier this month, Geoffrey Owens, a former actor on the Cosby Show, was seen bagging groceries at a Trader Joe’s. Someone snapped a photo, and it went viral for all the wrong reasons.
The internet trolls and celebrity news sites immediately jumped in, shaming the former TV star for falling so low as to work a job bagging groceries.
But Owens’ response was brilliant: “There is no job that is better than another job…. Every job is worthwhile and valuable.”
Owens says he was working at Trader Joe’s to help supplement his income between the inconsistent nature of acting work. But sadly, after the viral picture, he had to quit the job because of all the unwanted attention.
Job shaming is a real problem. We’ve all done it, and we’ve probably felt it too.
In our culture, we have a sort of hierarchy of what jobs classify as prestigious, and what jobs are demeaning. We hold doctors in higher regard than construction workers, college professors above preschool teachers, and lawyers higher than the officers who enforce the law.
Physical work often has the stigma of being lesser than knowledge work.
We’ve all heard jokes and cautionary tales of people who messed up their lives, dropped out of school, and now stuck flipping burgers at McDonald’s or bagging groceries at Walmart.
There are big problems with this perspective.
1. We need all kinds of jobs for society to thrive.
Imagine if we all bought into the lie that certain jobs like mopping floors, swinging hammers, or bagging groceries were beneath us.
The world as we know it would collapse without people doing these “lesser” jobs.
Who would build the room you are sitting in? Who would fix your car? How would you get food, receive a package, get running water in your home, or not live in a pile of your garbage without others to provide the basic services we take for granted?
The only reason modern society can function is that we have all kinds of people doing all sorts of valuable jobs for the benefit of others.
We cannot imagine a world without roads, farms, electricity, factories, grocery stores, gas stations, or fast food.
These “lesser” jobs are the backbone of modern society.
All work is valuable because we need it to provide the things we value.
2. We don’t always know the person’s situation.
We should not be so quick to judge people working in entry-level jobs, because we don’t know their story.
The cashier at the store could be a single mom, a teacher, a budding entrepreneur, or someone else who isn’t defined by the work they do but does the job you don’t want to do because they need the extra money right now.
They could be an immigrant seeking to provide a better life for their children, or someone with a disability or medical condition that is thankful to have a job they can do.
You don’t know their story. You don’t know where they grew up, how privileged or underprivileged they were, or what their successes and struggles have been along the way.
I spoke with an elderly man once who worked at McDonald’s who was a retired businessman. He mopped the floors and cleaned the bathrooms at McDonald’s because he was bored with retirement and wanted something of value to do. He took an entry-level job for the pleasure of a hard day’s work and the joy of working with other people.
So before you make a snap judgment of someone, learn their story.
3. A person’s worth does not equal their net-worth.
Our society values people by their bank accounts. But isn’t there more to life than making money?
From the Christian perspective, we believe that all people are created in the image of God (Gen 1:27). We all have inherent value based on our status as God’s creations.
And Jesus taught that even if we could gain the whole world, it’s meaningless if we lose our soul (Mark 8:36). Life is about more than the abundance of your possessions (Luke 12:15).
So when we consider a person to be of less value because of what they do for a living, we need to realize that we are the ones measuring by the wrong standard.
We should see people as God sees them. God “sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart” (1 Sam 16:7).
The work of the barista and the banker, the plumber and the pastor all have equal value in God’s eyes.
As long as your work doesn’t require you to sin, it is good in God’s book.
Whatever You Do, Do It For God
The primary Biblical teaching about our work can be summarized as, “whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God” (1 Cor 10:31).
It’s not about the job you have; it’s what you do with it.
Are you giving it your best? Are you honoring God with the way you serve your coworkers and customers? Does your attitude and work ethic bring glory to God?
Even God was not too great to do “less dignified” work.
As Tim Keller writes in his book Every Good Endeavor:
In Genesis we see God as a gardener, and in the New Testament we see him as a carpenter. No task is too small a vessel to hold the immense dignity of work given by God…. The material creation was made by God to be developed, cultivated, and cared for in an endless number of ways through human labor. But even the simplest of these ways is important. Without them all, human life cannot flourish. (49)
All work has honor and value.
Just because it’s not a job you would like to do, doesn’t mean it’s not a good job for someone else.
And just because your job isn’t as prestigious, another doesn’t mean it has any less value and worth.
So keep your head high and do your work for God, not the applause of people.
“Just because it’s not a job you would like to do, doesn’t mean it’s not a good job for someone else. And just because your job isn’t as prestigious, another doesn’t mean it has any less value and worth.”
By the same token, however, some jobs are objectively bad jobs because they are dangerous, dirty, and/or don’t pay well — in other words, a job that doesn’t allow one or one’s family to have a high quality of life.
When you and your wife both have to work 60+ hours a week just to pay the bills, guess what? Eventually, marriages dissolve. It adds a huge amount of stress and there’s only so much stress a marriage can take.
Or children wind up growing up without much parental involvement because mom and dad are so busy working, even if they stay together. And younger adults today aren’t getting married until much later, if at all, and many are childless well into their late-30s. Opinion polls that ask them why consistently show that the #1 reason for that is economic.
Clearly, we can see that the excesses of capitalism are a direct threat to the integrity of the family unit.
The pandemic is great for illustrating the problems with the inequitable distribution of the burdens of labor in the United States. While higher-class knowledge workers cloistered themselves fearfully in their homes and fretted over petty annoyances, seamlessly transitioning to remote work and often taking no pay cuts, retail workers who paradoxically were judged “essential” contracted the virus and died to it in disproportionate numbers. And they did it for paychecks of less than $30,000 per year, in most cases.
Other blue-collar workers were forced to take layoffs and furloughs, reducing their pay.
You can’t expect one group of people to shoulder all the risk and none of the reward of economic activity. It actually goes against basic assumptions of how capitalism, itself, is supposed to work. Reward should follow risk, but that’s not how things have actually worked in the United States for a long time, as the pandemic shows.
America has a reckoning coming over the way it allows its workers to be treated. But then, America has multiple reckonings coming over an assortment of different issues, so I guess we can just add this one to the ever-growing list.
I think people are just way to sensitive about what others think of them. A real man of value will do anything to pay his way and make ends for himself. However for those who feel they rather have high end employment need to realize that those jobs take several months,even years to meet the requirements for. So I must inform them go do something about your passions other than whine about NOT having them. Save your money from mopping floors and use it to attend Community College other than feeling sorry for you spineless selves!