The Calling

Ask people why they do their work, and only some of the answer is the wage. They speak of the use of it, the pride in it, the people it serves, the self it lets them become; of a thing worth doing for its own sake. We have a word for work like that — a calling, a vocation, from the Latin for a voice, as though the work summoned the worker to it.¹1The idea of worldly work as a ‘calling’ (German Beruf) — a vocation valued beyond its pay — received its classic statement from Max Weber, who traced it to the Reformation: ordinary labour reimagined as a summons, dignified and chosen in itself, not merely endured for a wage. The word is old and half-religious, but the thing it names is ordinary: most people want their work to mean something, and not only to pay. This meaning is a kind of second wage, paid not in coin but in significance, and it appears on no slip. Yet it is not free of the first wage, the one that does. The two are entangled, and the manner of their entanglement is among the stranger facts in the economics of work — for they do not add together as one would expect. They trade against each other; and worse, the one can destroy the other.

Begin with the trade. Adam Smith saw it in 1776, in the very chapter where he set out what makes one wage differ from another: of all the forces that lift a wage or lower it, the first he named was the agreeableness or disagreeableness of the work itself.²2Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (1776), Book I, ch. 10. Wages adjust for the non-monetary character of work — its ease or hardship, honour or dishonour, safety or danger — so that it is not the wage but ‘the whole of the advantages and disadvantages’ of employments that tends, under free choice, to equality. Agreeable and honourable work can therefore command less pay. A pleasant, honourable, meaningful job, he reasoned, draws people to it for reasons other than the pay, and so need not pay as much; a dirty, dangerous, or shameful one must bribe people in, with a wage high enough to make up for what the work itself costs them. It is not the wage that equalises across employments, Smith concluded, but the whole of the advantages and disadvantages — the wage plus everything the work is and gives. The meaning, then, is part of the pay; and the more of it a job offers, the less of the other pay it need offer. This is the vocation penalty, and it falls most heavily where the meaning runs deepest and is most taken for granted. The care of the sick and the old, the teaching of the young, the making of art, the tending of souls and of communities — the work most steeped in purpose — is, with a regularity that ought to trouble us, among the worst paid, in part because those who do it will do it for less, for the meaning, and everyone knows that they will.

Work that pays in meaning pays less in money.

That meaning lowers the wage is surprising enough. The deeper strangeness is that the wage can lower the meaning. Money and significance are not merely substitutes traded at a stable rate; the act of paying can reach into the meaning and spoil it. The clearest demonstration is also the most famous. In 2000 two economists studied a set of daycare centres in Haifa troubled by parents who came late to collect their children. The centres began to fine the latecomers — and lateness went up, not down, and stayed up.³3Gneezy and Rustichini, ‘A Fine Is a Price’ (Journal of Legal Studies, 2000): fining late parents increased lateness, and removing the fine did not undo it. Cf. the psychological evidence that extrinsic rewards can undermine intrinsic motivation (Deci, 1971; Deci and Ryan), and Titmuss’s celebrated — though empirically contested — claim that paying for blood would reduce donation (The Gift Relationship, 1970). The fine had not deterred the parents; it had released them. Where before a late parent felt the tug of an obligation — they were imposing on the teachers, keeping them past their evenings — now they had a price, and a low one, and could simply pay it and feel nothing. A moral relation had been converted into a market transaction, and the conversion did not run backward: when the centres dropped the fine, the lateness did not fall back to where it had begun. The guilt, once priced, did not return for free. The economists titled their paper, precisely, ‘A Fine Is a Price’ — and the lesson reaches far past daycares. Pay people to give blood and some give less, not more, for a gift has been turned into a sale; reward a child for reading and the reading can curdle into a chore done for the reward, dropped the moment the reward stops. Psychologists call it the crowding-out of intrinsic motivation: under the wrong conditions, a payment offered for what was freely done drives out the freedom, and leaves less behind than there was before money entered the room.

A price can drive out what no price could buy.

Two readings contend over these facts, and the folio owes both their due. The first is generous, and not wrong. The vocation penalty, on this reading, is no injustice but a free and open bargain: no one conscripts the nurse, the teacher, the artist; they choose the work knowing it pays less, because it pays in the other currency, and the lower wage is simply the price they willingly give for the meaning they take.⁴4On the compensating-differential view this is no wrong but an exchange: those who prize a job’s meaning sort into it and accept lower pay, the meaning being part of what they are paid. And the deeper good is real — to have work one would do for love is among the genuine fortunes of a life, not a delusion to be dispelled. The meaning is part of their compensation, as real to them as money; to insist they are simply underpaid is to ignore what they themselves are buying with the wage they forgo. And the deeper good is real beyond dispute: to have work one would do for love — work that is a calling and not merely a job — is among the great fortunes of a life, the opposite of the far commoner bargain of selling one’s hours at a task one is glad to leave at the door. That some work can be loved is not a trap to be exposed; it is a thing to wish for everyone, and the counsel to seek it is, at heart, kind.

The second reading is darker, and also not wrong. For the very same fact — that people will do beloved work for less — is, from the other side, a lever, and one that gets pulled. If the carer will care for the meaning, then the meaning can be used to underpay the care; if the devotion is reliable, the wage can be set below what the devotion is worth and the difference kept by whoever pays, secure that the work will be done regardless, for love. A whole creed has grown up to oil this lever — the cheerful modern command to ‘do what you love’ — and its critics have shown how neatly it serves: if work is love, then to ask fair pay for it seems crass, a betrayal of the passion, and so the love becomes, in one writer’s phrase, the most elegant of anti-worker arguments, dressing labour as devotion precisely so that it need not be paid or bounded as labour.⁵5Miya Tokumitsu, ‘In the Name of Love’ (2014): the ‘do what you love’ ethic can disguise work as passion and so license underpayment and overwork — ‘emotionally satisfying work is still work.’ The penalty falls hardest on care work long assigned to women and assumed to flow from natural love (cf. plate vi, the unwaged). The penalty falls hardest, and least by accident, on the work long assigned to women — the nursing, the teaching, the minding, the feeding — which is presumed to flow from a natural love, and so held, by a very old habit, scarcely worth paying for at all. Emotionally satisfying work is still work; and to refuse to call it work, however tender the refusal sounds, is to hold the door open for the plainest exploitation.

Both readings are true at once, which is what makes the matter hard, and their shared truth fits in a sentence: the meaning of work is real, and so is its abuse. The wage cannot settle between them, because the wage cannot see the meaning at all. It measures the price of the work and is blind to its worth, and the two are not the same number. This is the limit the folio has been circling since it named the wage the measure of all value: the wage measures everything except the one thing that makes work most worth doing — and when it tries to, when a price is laid upon a calling, it is as apt to corrode the worth as to capture it.⁶6Crowding-out is not a law but a tendency, and a conditional one — rewards can also ‘crowd in’ motivation — sharpest where the work is genuinely a calling. The remedy the critics urge is not to stop paying but to pay fairly and honour the meaning: the two currencies together, not one offered in place of the other. The decent course is therefore neither to deny the meaning (and so license the underpayment) nor to trust the meaning to pay the rent (for it cannot). It is to pay fairly in the first currency and to honour the second — to treat beloved work as work, fully paid, and as a calling, fully respected — and to refuse the bargain, always offered in love’s name, that asks the worker to take the meaning instead of the money rather than alongside it.

So we reach the edge of what the wage can do. It can measure the worth of a thing and sell the hours of a life; stand as a pledge and fall under compulsion; settle by power and bound the world of work; refuse to drop; serve as the measure of value; buy obedience; shelter against risk; and stand in the shadow of the machine. The one thing it cannot do is say why the work was worth doing. That part of the reward was never money, and was never for sale — and it is the part, when the work is a calling, that the worker would keep though all the rest were taken away.