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What The Obamacare Debate Reveals About How Americans View Work

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You heard echoes of America's Puritan roots in Republicans' latest argument against Obamacare: Work is a irreducible part of who we are and anything that shifts incentives away from work is a step toward indolence and sloth.


"It's not about becoming wealthy. Even when people have buckets of cash, they don't quit and they don't spend it. So there's something else going on," said Stephanie Mudge, research fellow at the University of Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute and sociology professor at UC-Davis. "We've gotten married to a certain notion of what makes us good people. What makes me a good person? How do I know I'm saved? I know I'm among the chosen if I can prove that I worked hard."


"Work is very deep in our identity," Tom Kochan, professor of work and employment research at MIT. "We want to be productive workers. We want to feel that we are adding value."



"What it often is about that's really driving this behavior is how work performance is evaluated. Workers' insecurity about their ability to remain employed and to remain perceived as valuable," he said. "In an environment where you never know if your job will still be there, you can't afford to take the time off."

The cliche remains true: Americans work a lot. Part of it is societal, that Protestant work ethic so often invoked. "The ideal worker phenomenon is still dominating a lot of our mentality," Kochan said.

But part of is structural: As liberals will eagerly point out, the United States doesn't have the policies that allow Europeans to take longer vacations and work shorter weeks. It's likely a product of combining American cultural norms with a business lobby that has, almost without fail, stymied any legislation to change the status quo. Any efforts to, say, raise the minimum wage are also met with staunch resistance, as the debate so far in 2014 has demonstrated, Kochan said.

"We've had an impasse over labor and employment policies in this country since the 1970s," he said. "The labor movement hasn't been able to build the political strength necessary to advance and modernize our labor laws. Business has blocked everything."


Sharone, whose research is focused on interviewing unemployed workers, said the most common thing he hears is how they would rather either create their own business or change jobs to pursue a career they find more fulfilling, but feel they can't, and one of the biggest reasons is health coverage.

"That to me captures the American orientation to work, these kind of dual kinds of things: autonomy, adventure, looking for contribution and meaning. Those feelings are more common in the U.S," he said. "The identity that we tend to derive from work, the identity we want to derive from work, we want to do something positive in the world."

"I think the ACA can facilitate that," Sharone added.

And that brings the conversation full circle. Implicit in the conservative criticism of Obamacare after the CBO report was a belief that the law was disrupting that cherished American work ethic. But a closer look at the evidence suggests that our relationship to work -- as we perform it in the real world -- is more ambivalent than that conventional wisdom allows.

