TGIF Concept New, Tied to Regimented Workplaces
The research assistant had put in a long day at a major university laboratory isolating enzymes, those feisty proteins that catalyze reactions in living systems.
The project is crucial to understanding some of the mysteries of cancer, but to the assistant, it’s work.
Five miles away from the laboratory at the Terminal Annex Post Office, where tons of mail are being sorted and routed to cities all over the world, a clerk is anxiously awaiting 5 p.m. Punch-out time.
The thread that links the clerk to the scientist is the five-day workweek, and both will probably spend much of their careers looking forward to “the weekend”--respites from regimented toil.
Work Five Days for Two
“The attitude of many modern workers (is) that they can stand being miserable for five days a week in order to do what they want for two days,” said Steven J. Ross of USC.
Ross, a historian who does comparative studies of attitudes of workers throughout the centuries said the concept of TGIF--Thank God It’s Friday--is relatively new.
“In the 19th Century, most Americans saw themselves as working-class producers. Now most people define themselves as middle-class consumers, who derive far more satisfaction from how they spend money than from what they do to make it,” he said.
That does not mean that the majority of modern American workers hate their jobs.
To the contrary, Ross said, most American workers just generally prefer leisure time to working time, an attitude that helped forge the modern concept of the weekend.
The term did not exist in the early 19th Century in the sense that it now does, said Ross, who noted that aside from avoiding work on Sundays as biblical law dictated, every other day of the week was work as usual.
The historian theorizes that ever-expanding industrialization helped change the concept of work and leisure in the United States and that the lives of ordinary people were profoundly affected by the Industrial Revolution.
“Many workers saw clearly that the changes triggered by industrialization would make it impossible to integrate work, leisure and life,” he said.
“In many cases, they literally fought to prevent this degradation in the quality of their lives.”
But he argues that the concept of the weekend was primarily brought on by highly regimented work.
“If you brought in someone from another planet or another century and told them that you worked five days a week just to get enough money to do what you wanted to do for two days they would think that something was fundamentally wrong,” he said.
“Over the years, work became an incredibly regimented experience--producing for someone else. We have lost the large class of worker-artisans of the last century.”
New Concepts Needed
Ross, who has authored a new text titled “Workers on the Edge: Work, Leisure and Politics in Industrializing Cincinnati,” said he is convinced that American workers need to radically change their concepts of work again.
“A century ago, workers were more satisfied with their jobs, because they had far more control than they do today,” he said. “Since the U.S. trade deficit has been growing, management experts have worried about the loss in U.S. labor productivity.”
Ross said some management experts have been advocating changes that would give back some autonomy and freedom to workers, but he argues most usually ask, “How can we get people to work harder?”
“The question is not how can we make people work harder,” he said, “but what can we do to make people feel that they want to do more.”
He said part of the answer to that question is permitting more creativity in the workplace by allowing workers to perform more than one task.
“I come from a working class background, I know what the complaints are,” said Ross, who points an accusing finger at Henry Ford, whom he quotes as once saying: “I want my people to be part of the machinery.”
